ABSTRACT
This chapter begins through a succession of methodological theses, postulates about the Soviet empire. Empire as a great world power that employs authoritarian, discriminatory control over its ethnically dissimilar borderlands or colonies. All empires resemble each other by family resemblance, notwithstanding the fact that there remain significant differences between various strategies of rule within an empire and between different empires. To begin with some methodological remarks, the chapter argues for the need to dismantle the opposition between subjective and objective approaches to the Soviet empire. It also argues against a disciplinary aversion to "what is" questions: a fastidious over-concern for not (re)producing essentialism should not stand in the way of scholarly inquiry. The chapter analysis of Terry Martin's argument as an occasion to dismantle the objective‒subjective dichotomy. Empire, like a nation, should be understood non-substantially, not as a fixed entity, but as a developing formation that is continuously reshaped by internally inconsistent and self-contradictory technologies of rule.
