The Naval Strategists in the Modernization Processes of the Russian Empire: Expertise, the Navy and Nationalism in the System of Imperial Governance, 1885-1904.

The research covers intellectual and political activities of a specific professional network of naval ‘strategists’ of the Russian Imperial Navy in 1880-1900ss. The work’s main aim is to show how the new historical narrative could replace the structuralist and teleological narratives of the Russian imperial and naval history and represent the historical diversity, the differentiated practices of naval ‘strategists’ to construct the virtual realities of the modern naval science expertise, decision-making and history writing and to use them in the imperial governance. Based on the methodology of New Imperial, New Naval, and Actor-network theory, this project reconstructs the practices of producing a new naval ‘strategic’ reality and the political implementation of its languages, categories, practices, and logics in the sphere of Russian maritime trade legislation in 1901-1904. The explanatory models and categories of the new reality, which were built on the basis of historical material, were transformed into categories of naval practice and strategic analytics, applicable not only for analyzing the past and present, but also for forecasting and even constructing the future based on new theoretical models and methods of ‘naval science’. Naval technology, economics and politics, strategy and nationalism can all be part of the same historical narrative. The project involves a wide range of archival and published materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Navy, the Russian State Historical Archive, the Russian State Library and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, which contain the most complete but almost completely unsystematized intellectual heritage of naval ‘strategists’.