Decolonizing the Transnational, Transnationalizing the Decolonial: Russian Studies at the Crossroads

UKRAINE on 24 February 2022 and the ensuing brutal war have caused shock and upheaval, moral and intellectual, across the multidisciplinary field of knowledge, study and expertise commonly referred to, in the Anglophone world, as 'Russian Studies'.The present war has prompted many scholars in our field to reconsider their work -theoretically and practically, ethically and politically -bringing a sense of urgency to the field's ongoing self-reflection.In our case, the war has led us to rethink the assumptions and conclusions of our coedited volume Transnational Russian Studies. 1 This volume formed part of a broader Transnational Modern Languages initiative, which sought to grant Modern Languages a more coherent disciplinary identity centred on the transnational paradigm. 2 Our volume began from the premise that Russia is a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual formation and sought to place the mobility of language, culture, ideas and people within, across and beyond national boundaries at the core of our understanding of that which we study.Crucial to this was our call for an epistemological shift in Russian Studies.This entailed a move away from the tacit methodological nationalism that took 'Russianness' for granted.We argued, instead, for a reflexive deconstruction of the epistemological boundary-work sustaining the various reigning notions of 'Russia' and 'Russianness', as well as for a Bakhtininspired ethical reframing of our field's dominant epistemological perspectives, emphasizing the imperative of viewing our object of study simultaneously from without and from within.Transnational Russian Studies was published in early 2020, but Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years later prompted us to return to our ideas with a new set of questions.To what extent was our 'transnational' approach still necessary -or even valid -at a time when the Russian army was literally transgressing national borders?How do our calls to transnationalize the field coincide with -and differ from -the voices now calling, with increasing urgency, to decolonize it?To what extent do