The Dissolution of the “Imagined Community”: Nationalization as Expropriation

Abstract

The role of the public modernizer and the project of piecemeal social reformism became redundant in the situation of “permanent revolution.” With the constant radicalization of the regime and the masses such attempts inevitably come to be seen as “conservative” vis-à-vis the revolutionary agenda. The corporation of agricultural specialists structured by the ethos of piecemeal reformism of the peasant economy and by high social demand for their services as expressed through the booming job market found themselves in a social and ideological void. The editorial opening in the very first issue of the leading Messenger of Agriculture in 1918 expressed the utter frustration of countryside modernizers, acknowledging the return to “ground zero” of the post-1905 Bezvremenie (literally: an epoch “out of time”) period, only without any positive program of action or hope:

We came into the new year along the path of such a bezvremenie that one cannot even think about any logically substantiated program whatsoever.¹