Space matters. This is one of the main contentions of the essay at hand. This response argues that time matters as well and suggests that we think about ways in which ideas of space changed over time. This could be seen as a framework for spatial scenarios, like an earlier idea of scenarios of power.Footnote ¹ A spatial scenario would combine the key legitimizing themes of a particular reign as expressed in the idea of space. This idea of space would be expansive and include all the former empire equally.

The essay challenges a number of hierarchies. Following others, the authors use the term “Romanov empire” and avoid using the term “Russians” when speaking of the agents of their narratives. The essay also calls into question academic hierarchies, as decentering Russians and Russianness means that those areas of study would no longer be preferred in job searches, academic prizes, and the variety of other aspects of academic life that announce its values. The hope is that this could validate and expand research in areas often seen as secondary to the field.

The entangled histories perspective provides a reason for histories of “peripheries” to matter beyond the bounds of national borders and histories and connect with a larger Romanov empire historiography. While crucial for the nations that emerged after 1991, national histories can leave out the larger imperial framework, focusing instead on an us versus them approach. However, it is important to compare apples with apples. Collective memory, especially as deployed by governments, is not the same as the works of scholars from those countries.

The article relies on the work of Georgiy Kasianov to argue that Ukraine’s post-Soviet historiography has been negative and biased against Russia. Kasianov’s work has argued against the efforts of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory and related, often political, groups to set the agenda of Ukrainian historiography.Footnote ² However, when we look at what historians, rather than politicians, have been publishing in Ukraine, a different picture begins to emerge. While the 1990s were, it seems, an era of black-and-white thinking, scholars in Ukraine from the 2000s onward have written work that connects with larger trends in transnational, regional, and even entangled histories.Footnote ³

The idea of horizontal entanglements is an interesting one and can be related to similar approaches within Soviet history. In particular, Vladimir Paperny’s idea of culture two, which states that there was a shift from the horizontality of the 1920s to a pronounced verticality under Stalin.Footnote ⁴ The earlier horizontality was expressed in low-slung, sometimes constructivist, buildings, along with less emphasis on hierarchy, while the Stalinist skyscrapers also expressed a new hierarchical focus. We can ask whether an era is a horizontal or vertical one, following this approach. For example, the shift from the scenario of power of Alexander II and Alexander III might be approached as a similar, although less extreme shift from horizontal to vertical focus. Bringing these two approaches together results in what I call spatial scenarios.

Paperny’s focus on architecture suggests that the question of horizontality and verticality can have a strong expression within the cultural sphere. Reaching back to the Petrine era, the architectural work of Semyon Remizov sought to celebrate the Siberian town of Tobolʹsk as a new Jerusalem, which included a new entry gate, and thus potentially to supplant the role of Moscow, which at that time was still the capital. This was part of a murky affair that led to the execution of the Siberian governor in a manner more typical of the deaths meted out to traitors. Rumors swirled that he had intended to use Swedish prisoners of war to detach Siberia from Russia.Footnote ⁵ The building program stopped with his death. Under Nicholas I, the architecture of the provinces was standardized, which led to enduring tropes in Russian literature about their sameness.Footnote ⁶ Such architecture could be seen as an attempt to erase the difference of the provinces and thus impose a clear visual hierarchy.

One of the larger implications of the article, if the ideas are so extended, is to note that horizontality can lead to the violent imposition of verticality. Another example might be the experiments of the 1990s giving way to the imposition of Vladimir Putin’s “power vertical” by the 2000s. This shift suggests that these horizontal connections can be seen as a threat by a centralizing power.

The authors ask if the government wanted horizontal ties. My work suggests that they did in the era of Nicholas I, but only within an economic framework.Footnote ⁷ The creation of the provincial newspapers (gubernskie vedomosti) in the 1830s provides a rich example of the proliferation of horizontal ties, as provinces exchanged issues of the newspapers and published material from other provinces in their own paper. The underlying idea of the newspapers was taken from Adam Smith and his belief in the power of emulation and competition to spread economic productivity. However, the spread of information in practice could not be limited to economic items only, and this led to the creation of provincial identities in places that had never had them before. Much later, Soviet interest in the creation of economic regions sought to stimulate the economy, now on a communist basis, but in practice, this also led to the spread of non-economic ideas without transforming the economy.Footnote ⁸

The article raises some challenging and important questions. Whose story is the Russian empire’s? Who is the agent of that story? The Russians still want to tell the empire’s story, while others want a story of resistance. We see the phantom threads of empire throughout the daily news, with Putin’s belief that he is entitled to “his” Ukraine. Horizontal threads are presented as an antidote to a centralized narrative. Still, where would these threads be found? In which archives? Elsewhere, I have argued against the reification of “the Russian archives” as the single standard.Footnote ⁹

The essay argues that horizontal entanglements help to explain the empire, but what about its unraveling? Would this metaphor help to explain how threads snap and how the Bolsheviks and, later, Putin, tried to weave them back together? Or would this approach highlight too much the central approach? Then again, both warp and weft, center and periphery are both needed to create any fabric, including a social one. Furthermore, the warp, or vertical threads, remain stationary, while the weft, or horizontal ones, are drawn through to create the fabric. Even at this level, this suggests that a focus on the horizontal may well be more dynamic and yet incomplete. It may be that there needs to be agreement on what the warp is in order to make a cohesive fabric. A horizontal approach could bring in other threads, but there still needs to be a single loom on which to weave any given fabric, and that is a tall order indeed.

The essay refers to V.O. Kliuchevskii, the foundational nineteenth-century Russian historian. From Kliuchevskii’s perspective, the empire’s story belonged to the Russians, both in terms of historical agents and historians. The Russians as a people provided the colonizing force that provided shape and meaning to the empire.Footnote ¹⁰ In the US, the foundation of Russian history under Michael Karpovich, a student of Kliuchevskii and a longtime historian at Harvard led to what Mark von Hagen called the mainstream and the peripheral skirmishers (Ukrainians, among others.)Footnote ¹¹ The skirmishers tried to call into question the foundational views of the field, but only after the full-scale invasion did a wider discussion of the question arise. Vitaly Chernetsky argues that this is a field where power is unevenly divided, and notes that Ukrainians must often struggle with epistemic injustice, such as being prejudged as always and already nationalistic, among other issues.Footnote ¹² The essay seeks to entirely reweave the field, but relations of power are hard to change.

While the essay focuses relentlessly on the level of administration and everyday life, the same approach could be applied to intellectual history. For example, more could be built on the connections between Ukrainian federalists like Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo Drahomanov and Siberian regionalists who were influenced by their ideas to pursue a more autonomous Siberia in the late imperial period and through the Russian Civil War.Footnote ¹³ Polish, Tatar, and indigenous Siberian ideas were horizontal threads that could be woven in. There was a circulation of ideas as well as of improved dog nets.

What would it mean in a practical sense if the Russians were no longer the default people of study in our field? Perhaps the transmission of ideas throughout the empire could be the focus of a research collective bringing together scholars from different areas of the post-Soviet region. By not defaulting to Russian narration, other peoples are given agency and the ability to narrate for themselves. Russian rule becomes a dialogue, rather than a monologue.

On a practical level, it might mean that western scholars work with scholars from many places, rather than just from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Bringing together a large number of scholars with the requisite language and archival skills would require an institution with deep expertise and pockets. Perhaps a German-scale sponsorship of a research collective could lead to such results. Only the strongest institutions could carry this out, however.

The essay lays out the reasons and ways to use the empire to tell other stories in addition to ones that focus on Russians. This is, of course, part of the larger discussion in the field after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As we have seen, the essay calls for a reorientation of imperial space, partly due to loss of access to archives in Russia, but also due to a growing sense that the old ways of teaching and writing Russian history need to be revisited.

In conclusion, the essay provides a new way of telling the empire’s story without telling an imperial story. Despite all the difficulties in doing so, this is a thread well worth following.