‘Boundaries of History’ Seminar Starts New Season of Meetings
On September 30, Stephen Riegg, Assistant Professor of History of the Texas A&M University, presented his book Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914 at the first seminar of this year’s Boundaries of History series. We spoke with Professor Alexander Semyonov, the seminar chair and the Director of the HSE Centre for Historical Research, about the goals of the seminar and to Stephen Riegg about his research.
Alexander Semyonov, Director of the Centre for Historical Research
Once the Faculty of History (now the Department of History, and the Centre for Historical Research) was established at the HSE campus in St. Petersburg in 2012, the first thing we thought about was a research seminar, which would bring together historians with different backgrounds: political and intellectual history, environmental and technological history, social and cultural history. In addition to creating a discussion platform for different research schools, traditions and approaches, we also wanted to promote the new faculty among the academic community. We were planning to focus on the systematic reflections and advancement of global, comparative, and transnational history. Hence, we settled on Boundaries of History as the title of the seminar.
The complex metaphor in the title refers to limits and scales in comparative and global history, as well as the goal of studying historically-formed diversity and, in particular, the diversity and complex arrangement of difference in historic empires
The metaphor also emphasizes the everlasting methodological problem of boundaries between history and other social sciences and humanities. Moreover, we often discuss the division between history and historical memory in all of its manifestations, in particular, fostering a dialogue between professional and public history.
We always try to stay true to this agenda, inviting or responding to the requests of prominent or distinguished scholars in these respective fields. Relevant and prominent publications and joint projects also provide a good reason and occasion for specific events.
The seminar has proved to be a living organism and it evolved together with the currents of contemporary historiography. For example, a number of papers presented at the seminar addressed what we called ‘contested global history’
We were happy to start this year’s seminars with the paper of Stephen B. Riegg, Assistant Professor of History of the Texas A&M University and winner of the Ab Imperio Award given by Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space journal, which I co-edit. Professor Riegg won the award in the Best Book category for his book Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).
Russia’s Entangled Embrace traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia’s territorial fringes and navigated the empire’s metropolitan centers. Engaging ongoing debates about imperial structures that were simultaneously symbiotic and hierarchically ordered, Stephen Badalyan Riegg helps us to understand how, for Armenians, imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities.
He examines why, and how, Russian architects of empire imagined Armenians as being politically desirable. These circumstances included the familiarity of their faith, perceived degree of social, political, or cultural integration, and their actual or potential contributions to the state’s varied priorities. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial relationship—beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians—allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the contexts of diasporic distribution, interimperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.
Stephen Badalyan Riegg, Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University
I was born in Yerevan in 1986, just a few years before Armenia emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union as an independent state. As a result of my relatives’ advanced education in the Soviet system, my ethnic Armenian family was Russified in its cultural and even political outlooks, which occasionally conflicted and periodically aligned with the general attitudes of the Armenian society around us. As a child I observed, but did not yet understand, the overlapping tensions and partnerships between post-Soviet Armenian and Russian elements. Unraveling the modern roots of that tangled embrace became a mission of my graduate studies, which resulted in the dissertation that I later revised and expanded into my book.
I emailed Dr Semyonov back in 2013 on the advice of my dissertation advisor, Dr. Louise McReynolds. To my tremendous gratitude, Dr. Semyonov agreed to sponsor my visa and host me at HSE during my dissertation research. In 2013 and 2014, I conducted about a year and a half of full-time research in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yerevan. Because my book focuses on the evolution of tsarist policies toward Armenians, rather than a history of Russo-Armenian ties, the sources are mainly Russian.
My experience at HSE was simply wonderful and I remain very grateful to Dr. Semyonov and the entire HSE community for their ongoing support. It was a real pleasure—and an important professional experience—to spend 2014 attending seminars, such as Boundaries of History, at HSE and meeting diverse specialists.
Since 2014, I have continued to benefit from my affiliation with HSE and I am eager to return to St. Petersburg when the pandemic circumstances allow international travel
Main Findings and a New Project
Accommodation, not assimilation, guided the tsarist approach toward Armenians. Russian chauvinism patronized Armenians as Aziatsy, but they remained familiar, “our” Asiatics. Religious kinship between Oriental Orthodox Armenians and Eastern Orthodox Russians was an enduring cultural link that undergirded the political bond between these imperial actors, even when Armenian clerics and Russian bureaucrats required interpreters at their meetings.
Many statesmen branded Armenians as distinctly non-European and some agents denigrated Armenian villagers as “semi-wild,” but the government saw few incentives for their coerced assimilation or total subjugation. Instead, St. Petersburg unfurled variedly successful efforts to use Armenians in its governance of the Caucasus and to advance its foreign policies.
My new project is tentatively titled “Westerners in the Tsar's East: Russian Imperialism and European Expatriates in the Caucasus.” By the turn of the nineteenth century, Russian officials faced a colonial problem that many of them realized required innovation: the long-coveted Caucasus region could not be annexed through the traditional use of Cossack cavalry and Slavic settlers alone. My project reconsiders the story of Romanov imperialism in the Caucasus by uncovering Russia’s trial-and-error strategy of transplanting or tolerating the settlement of Western European communities in its strategically vital borderlands.
The protagonists include Scottish missionaries, French silk barons, German schismatics, British oil speculators, Swiss evangelicals, and the Russian bureaucrats who monitored them. With both alacrity and apprehension, the Russian state hoped to secure the sociopolitical stability and economic vitality of its Caucasus dominion through the collaboration of foreign expatriates. To the tsarist ministers, viceroys, and other architects of empire, I argue, these techniques were provisional and contingent. In other words, they were experimental.
In 2021/2022 academic year Centre for Historical Research will hold a series of seminars with prominent scholars:
- On October 21, Paolo Sartori (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Pavel Shabley (Chelyabinsk State University, Kostanay Branch), Ab Imperio Award 2019 winners in the Best Book nomination, will present their book Эксперименты империи: адат, шариат и производство знаний в Казахской степи [Empire Experiments: Adat, Sharia and Knowledge Production in the Kazakh Steppe].
- Also, on October 28 there will be a meeting with Ivan Sablin, Jargal Badagarov, and Irina Sodnomova (Heidelberg University, Germany), Ab Imperio Award 2020 winners in the nomination ‘Best article in a peer-reviewed academic journal or chapter in a scholarly collection’.
- On November 25, Yoshiro Ikeda from University of Tokyo will give a paper.
Seminars will be held in a hybrid or online format.
Follow the announcements on the website
Follow the Centre for Historical Research on Facebook
Alexander Semyonov
Director, Centre for Historical Research
See also:
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How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Nine: Big Connections
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How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Eight: The Russian Field of Experiments
The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The eighth episode of the series recounts how Russia first adapted the telephone for military and logistical purposes, created a shell company headed by a nominal executive for reselling the rights to Western competitors, and intensively developed communication infrastructure in the country's two capitals, making such progress that Vladimir Lenin insisted on capturing and maintaining control of telephone exchanges at all costs.
How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Seven: German Efficiency
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How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Six: The Telephone's Misadventures in France
The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The sixth episode of the series recounts events in France when the private owner of the telephone network was compelled to sell it to the government at a knockdown price, and the impact it had on the development of communications in the country. Spoiler alert: the impact, naturally, was detrimental.
How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Five: From the US Free Market to Conservative Britain
In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The fifth episode of the series chronicles the early experiences of the telegraph and telephone in Great Britain, shedding light on the challenges they faced, and explores the adverse impact of excessive government regulation and nationalisation on the evolution of telecommunications.
Peacocks, Pepper, and Petrol: The Early History of Imports from Asia
Petroleum for equine care, wood oil for lighting, sandalwood for Easter celebrations, and lemons and olives for entertaining unexpected guests. Russian monasteries often used these and other eastern goods in the period leading up to and during the reign of Peter the Great. Analysing their account books leads to a revision of the traditional assumptions about the primary consumers of oriental goods in Russia. These consumers, in addition to the royal and aristocratic circles, included monastery estates, as discussed in the paper ‘“Three altyns worth of petroleum…”: Oriental goods in Russia at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century’ by historian Arthur Mustafin of HSE University. Based on his paper, IQ.HSE explores the types of goods that were shipped from the East to Russia in the latter half of the 17th to the early 18th century, including the routes and purposes of these shipments.
How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Four: David the Start-up Versus the Corporate Goliath
The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The fourth episode of the series recounts the story of the fledgling start-up's confrontation with hordes of patent trolls and its subsequent victory in a full-blown corporate war against the largest telecommunications company of the late 19th century.
‘In Search of the Key to the Past’: Students of HSE Art and Design School in Nizhny Novgorod Develop Collection of Souvenirs
The HSE Art and Design School in Nizhny Novgorod, together with the ‘Protected Quarters’ project to revive Nizhny Novgorod’s historical territories, have carried out the ‘Timeless’ creative project, which included a design laboratory and an educational programme. As a result of the creative workshop, students made concepts for souvenir products based on the local identity.
How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Three: Connecting People
Today, we can make a telephone call to anyone, anywhere in the world—but this was not always the case. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The third episode focuses on the evolution of telephone connections, the first subscribers, and the history of the telephone directory.