This article outlines an emerging approach in the spatial history of the Romanov empire. Similar to other empires of the long nineteenth century, the Romanov empire has traditionally been understood as a spoked wheel, whose vertical axes of power and lines of communication flowed between the metropolitan “core” and the “peripheries.” We argue for the need to move beyond this well-worn image of the empire as a vertical structure of “center-periphery” relations. Instead, we consider the heuristic potential of studying horizontal “periphery-periphery” entanglements interconnecting this state, following threads which were not necessarily woven through the metropole. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of several examples from the Baltic and southwestern provinces, which highlight both the challenges and potentials of intra-imperial entangled history.

Chronology is an important framing mechanism in history and changes significantly based on who defines historical eras. The area studies field has recently grappled with the need to decenter perspectives and reconsider the sources that scholars use. This article uses deep learning artificial intelligence methods to process 169,634 images from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD), a major archive of photography in the region, as containing a statist chronological logic, one defined by political change in the center. By peering under the hood of the algorithm’s predictions, by thinking with the machine, it is possible to see patterns in the images that may not seem crucial to the human eye. Looking at RGAKFD as a potential source of data for AI raises parallels between algorithmic bias and the Moscow-centric bias of sources, while also providing opportunities to use such methods as a tool for exploratory research.

Nearly half a century ago, Allison Blakely produced Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. The landmark text explored Black people’s lives and experiences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and how non-Black people in those spaces received them and conceptualized blackness from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. Since its publication, many of the Black characters and historical episodes adorning Russia and the Negro have become the terrains or mainstays of scholarly debates about Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in Slavic, eastern, southeastern, and central European, as well as Eurasian societies.1 Roughly two decades later, others took up the mantel.

This “viewpoint” essay offers a response to the article by Catherine Gibson and Anton Kotenko, “Horizontal Threads.” After recounting the article’s main propositions, the essay assesses its argument and the potential that its program represents for the study of the Russian empire’s spatial history.

This article challenges historians’ recent Russian-Ukrainian war-related claims that the field of Russian history in the west, and in the United States in particular, has overlooked the imperial and colonial dimensions of Russia’s past. It argues that far from overlooking Russian and Soviet imperialism and colonialism and marginalizing the histories of non-Russian peoples in that context, Anglophone historians have been documenting and explaining them for almost a century. It shows that as early as the 1940s and 50s, Michael Karpovich and his former Harvard University students emphasized the need to pay greater attention to the history of Russian imperial expansion and colonization, Russia’s borderlands and its non-Russian peoples. By tracing the ways in which Anglophone historians over the next fifty years sought to make sense of Russian and Soviet empire, it becomes possible to see the so-called “imperial turn” in Russian historiography as a return to research agendas that had been established decades earlier and helped make possible the production of historical accounts of Russia arguably free from what Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi famously dubbed the “traditional scheme of ‘Russian’ history.”

This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

This article uses computational text analysis to examine Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Double, responding to the long-standing critical debates surrounding the text and particularly its form, which Dostoevskii saw as having failed his idea. It asserts that the problem of the ontological status of Goliadkin’s double can be productively considered through an analysis of the text’s use of liminality, a hallmark of romantic fantastic literature. TEI-XML encoding of liminality identified in the text enables a series of visualizations that show that liminality is primarily concentrated in interior spaces. Analyzing the visualizations, the authors argue that liminality is associated with Goliadkin’s social shame, suggesting that the double is an extension of Goliadkin’s psychology rather than a fantastic apparition. Using The Double as a case study, the authors argue that computational text analysis can extend and enrich traditional philological methods by enabling deep structural analysis of the text.

This essay looks at blackness in the USSR from its contested margins. Focusing on South Africans categorized as “Coloured,” I explore dynamics of translation, solidarity, misunderstanding, and invisibility that arose when differing systems of racial classification interacted. In South Africa under segregation and apartheid, an intermediate category emerged between the dominant white minority and the subjugated black majority: Coloured. As the USSR became involved in South African anti-racist struggles, Soviet citizens did not know how to see and understand these lighter-skinned people who did not fit neatly into Soviet preconceptions about darker-skinned people of African descent. A handful of Coloured activists took on particularly prominent roles representing the plight of black South Africans for Soviet audiences, and being lighter skinned shaped their experiences of the USSR in significant ways. Traversing the realms of Soviet policy, scholarship, cultural production, and everyday interactions, we see remarkable inconsistency in how Coloureds were regarded: as invisible and also hypervisible, artificial and also real, black and also not black. This essay traces Soviet trajectories of the liminal category “Coloured” to explore the extraordinary chaos at the edges of blackness in the USSR.

The wide-ranging spaces of Russia in its various guises have not always been reflected in historical narratives, which for many years focused on Moscow and St. Petersburg. This viewpoint piece focuses on how the entangled histories approach could be applied to tell the empire’s story without telling an imperial story. It ends with asking which vertical threads from the center are necessary to weave together a coherent narrative.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, a view that interprets Russian-Ukrainian relations as colonialism has gained ground in historical scholarship. However, based on an analysis of the terms “colonization” and “colonialism” and a comparison between Ukrainian territories and the Governorate-General of Turkestan in late imperial Russia, this article argues for a more cautious use of the term “colonialism” in relation to Ukraine. It shows that contemporaries rarely viewed tsarist rule in Ukraine through the prism of colonialism, while in the case of Central Asia this perspective was pervasive. Moreover, tsarist policy toward Central Asia and its predominantly Muslim population was much more in line with colonial practices than it was in the case of Ukraine. While colonial rule is generally based on the institutionalization of difference, the opposite was the case in Ukraine: Ukraine was appropriated as part of the Russian nation. Therefore, this article argues that Russia’s claims on Ukraine, which deny Ukraine’s right to national self-determination and statehood, are not an indication of colonial subjugation, but rather of nationalist usurpation.

In 1940s Hungary, there were two political parties—National Socialists on the right and communists on the left—typically depicted in mainstream media as extremist and prone to violence. They shared one crucial feature: both published joke magazines. Clearly envisioned as tools to recruit followers, their periodicals also served a broader purpose in transforming extremist ideas into commonsensical propositions for debate. Their rhetorical strategies were remarkably similar, consisting of three stages: 1) depicting disturbing conditions intended to inflame sentiments, 2) presenting a different view to convey the party’s preferred political stance, and finally 3) sketching ambitions for the future. Readers were led along a carefully orchestrated path into an alternative view of political possibilities, more effective for being dispersed along familiar avenues in Hungarian humor. The analysis is informed by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sara Ahmed, and Thomas Szanto on the pleasures of hating and the allure of a community who hate together.

The vast majority of Polish citizens lived through World War II and the Holocaust in the countryside. Nevertheless, power relations in rural communities have been largely overlooked by contemporary historiography. This study examines a profoundly liminal position of Polish village heads (sołtysi) in village communities during WWII. These lowest level clerks present in every Polish village faced intractable dilemmas and were often torn between the Nazi regime and their own communities. The case of village heads serves as a prime example of how the German occupier outsourced daily management of the occupation, exploited pre-existing structures and traditions, and used indirect rule in the communities it controlled. The paper discusses the role of village heads in creating the reality of occupation in the Polish countryside and the extent to which these village officials facilitated and participated in the Holocaust. The study is based primarily on early postwar trial documentation, Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, and village community records, most of which originate from the former Radom District of the General Government (today central Poland).

This response to “Horizontal Threads: Towards an Entangled Spatial History of the Romanov Empire,” reflects on shifting approaches to the structure of empires and the power of entanglement as an analytical tool for making sense of the incorporationist work of empire.

This essay examines how blackness is lived, perceived, and negotiated in (post)socialist Kazakhstan by placing the experiences of two “dual heritage” women—Aminata Uėdrаogo, a contemporary media personality, and Yelena Khanga, a Soviet and Russian-era journalist—in conversation. Prompted by a visit with Uėdrаogo in Almaty, I use autoethnographic and Black feminist methods to explore how blackness functions as both a limit and a possibility within shifting frameworks of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While scholarship on intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia exists, contemporary experiences of people of African descent—particularly women—remain largely absent.1 Through their narratives and embodied experiences, I argue that blackness in Central Asia complicates the presumed rupture between socialist and post-socialist periods and unsettles dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race. This analysis calls for further inquiry into African diasporic presence and theorizations of blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian contexts.

In this article I set out to show that tsarist officials and churchmen attempted to discredit anyone who wanted to convert from Orthodoxy to Islam in Russian Central Asia. Surrounded by a Muslim-majority population which they perceived as intrinsically hostile by dint of its religious affiliation, imperial officials regarded any apostate not only as someone breaking the law, but also in moral terms on a par with anyone who passed over to the enemy. I shall devote particular attention to the language employed by colonial authorities to frame apostasy either as the work of Muslim proselytizers or as reflective of a personality disorder on the part of the convert, such as poor morals, mental deficiency, or greed. By proceeding in this fashion, I shall argue that Russian colonial officials pursued smear campaigns against all successful converts as a means of minimizing and dismissing the phenomenon of Orthodox Christians’ conversions to Islam.

How can an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism be refashioned into a tool for building Soviet internationalism? This article tells the story of the bandura—the musical instrument constructed in the nineteenth century as an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism—and its fraught integration into the culture of Young Pioneers in early Soviet Ukraine. Focused on the shift in cultural policy from Leninist korenizastiia to Stalinist socialist realism, this article examines how the emancipatory and universalizing claims of Soviet internationalism became premised on Russified culture that inhibited the possibility of non-Russians’ full assimilation into the project of Soviet revolution. In the hands of Young Pioneers, who were appointed as Soviet “revolutionary agents” and as targets of the state’s pastoral care (“Stalin’s flowers”), the bandura became a particularly vexed symbol, epitomizing the irreconcilable tensions and the apparently inevitable violence inherent to nationalities policies in Soviet Ukraine. Following the intergenerational saga of a family of bandurists, the article shows how the disciplining technologies of Soviet musical-political education yielded often unexpected results.

This article examines the Soviet state’s contribution to the liberalization of international trade from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Looking at the USSR’s participation in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN agency dedicated to trade liberalization, the article reveals the Soviet state as an actor that pursued multiple and often contradictory goals at once. The purpose of the article is to complicate the view of the Soviet state as a “liberal subject,” an actor that always sought its self-interest. It calls for historians of the Soviet state to engage with the political, ideational, and emotional dimensions of economic exchanges to investigate the USSR’s place in the global economy.

This article examines the experiences of African students at the Gorʹkii Literary Institute in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the Soviet Union positioned itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial equality. Through case studies of Gaoussou Diawara and Fikre Tolossa, it explores the contradictions between the public celebration of African writers and the more complex, often racialized, dynamics they encountered. While officially embraced as symbols of socialist internationalism, these students were also subject to exoticization and subtle forms of exclusion. Based on archival materials, memoirs, interviews, and literary texts, the article argues that African writers in the USSR responded to these tensions with ambivalence, expressing admiration for the Soviet project while downplaying or reframing discrimination. Their experiences reveal how the ideals of socialist solidarity retained meaning even when undermined in practice, offering insight into the strategic ways postcolonial intellectuals negotiated belonging, dignity, and ideological commitment.

In 1877, Russian authorities in Turkestan arrested an Ottoman mullah who was reportedly spreading anti-tsarist propaganda in the Kazakh steppe. Upon closer inspection, the man turned out to be neither an Ottoman subject nor a Muslim religious leader. This article follows the travels of Hajji Ahmed, a young merchant from Dagestan who was at different times accused of being a Russian spy and an Ottoman spy. His three petitions and tsarist investigative reports reveal that he had traded throughout the Khanate of Khoqand, the Emirate of Bukhara, and tsarist Turkestan in the 1870s. This microhistory of a Muslim peddler offers a glimpse into tsarist anxieties about Muslim mobility and local fears of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It demonstrates that Russia’s colonial expansion provided new opportunities for tsarist Muslim subjects but also destabilized Central Asian societies and institutions, making the conditions of travel perilous. Tsarist paranoia about Ottoman emissaries, Tatar missionaries, and prospects of an anticolonial uprising led to Russia’s restrictions on transregional Muslim mobility.