Internal Colonization E-Book

Alexander Etkind

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 537

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book gives a radically new reading of Russia’s cultural history. Alexander Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conquered foreign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, thereby colonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision of colonization as simultaneously internal and external, colonizing one’s own people as well as others, is crucial for scholars of empire, colonialism and globalization.

Starting with the fur trade, which shaped its enormous territory, and ending with Russia’s collapse in 1917, Etkind explores serfdom, the peasant commune, and other institutions of internal colonization. His account brings out the formative role of foreign colonies in Russia, the self-colonizing discourse of Russian classical historiography, and the revolutionary leaders’ illusory hopes for an alliance with the exotic, pacifist sectarians. Transcending the boundaries between history and literature, Etkind examines striking writings about Russia’s imperial experience, from Defoe to Tolstoy and from Gogol to Conrad.

This path-breaking book blends together historical, theoretical and literary analysis in a highly original way. It will be essential reading for students of Russian history and literature and for anyone interested in the literary and cultural aspects of colonization and its aftermath.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Part I: The Non-Traditional Orient

1 Less than One and Double

Career of Improvement

Slavic Wilderness

Boomerang Effect

2 Worldliness

Three Worlds

Robinson’s Sables

Kipling’s Bear

Balfour’s Declaration

An Uncle’s Lesson

Part II: Writing from Scratch

3 Chasing Rurik

Inviting Leviathan

Tatishchev and the Amazons

Uvarov and the Black Athena

Origin is Destiny

4 To Colonize Oneself

Soloviev and the Frontier

Shchapov and Zoological Economy

Kliuchevsky and Modernity

Self-Colonization School

5 Barrels of Fur

Protego Ergo Obligo

A Divine Marvel

Boom and Depletion

Venus in Furs

Space Through Time

Part III: Empire of the Tsars

6 Occult Instability

Terra Nullius

Point of Rule

A Big Shave

Race and Estate

A Trip to the Countryside

Black Magic

Negative Hegemony

Fireworks

7 Disciplinary Gears

Serfs and Colons

German Colonies

Panopticon

Military Self-Colonization

Communes and Gauntlets

The Reversed Gradient

Indirect Rule

8 Internal Affairs

Intellectuals in Power

Especially Dangerous Sects

The New Alliance

Writing the Dictionary

System of Tenderness

Part IV: Shaved Man’s Burden

9 Philosophy Under Russian Rule

Königsberg

Intrigue and Melodrama

Kant

Bolotov

Camera Obscura and Fireworks

Herder

Conjectural History

10 Sects and Revolution

Peasant Christs

The Politicization of the Schism

The Militant Pilgrims

The Russian Luther

The Exemplary Farm

11 Re-Enchanting the Darkness

Darkness Was Here

Erebus and Terror

The Thick Description of Kurtz

Product of Nature

Horse Trading

Sadness

12 Sacrificial Plotlines

The Contact Zone of the Novel

Exchange and Mercy

The Gender of Sacrifice

The Real Day

The Double

Conclusion

References

Index

Copyright © Alexander Etkind 2011

The right of Alexander Etkind to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have built up a number of debts that cannot be returned. My parents, art historians Mark Etkind and Julia Kagan, defined my interests in unaccountable ways. My stepfather, philosopher Moisei Kagan, and my uncle, literary scholar Efim Etkind, gave examples of brilliance and courage. Every page of this book keeps the breath, temper, and care of Elizabeth Roosevelt Moore, my muse, opponent, and editor. Our sons, Mark and Moses, have inspired and distracted me in the proportion that has been, and will always be, quite right.

Igor Smirnov, Nancy Condee, Svetlana Boym, and Mark Lipovetsky gave this work early and invaluable encouragement. Oleg Kharkhordin, Irina Prokhorova, Irene Masing-Delic, and Alastair Renfrew edited the first versions of some of these ideas; their long-standing support is much appreciated. Conversations with Gyan Prakash helped me receive some wisdom from the mainstream of postcolonial studies. Eli Zaretsky and John Thompson were instrumental in making me write it all down. An exciting conference, Russia’s Internal Colonization, which Dirk Uffelmann and I organized at the University of Passau – an adventure from which we, along with Ilia Kukulin, have still not returned – resuscitated my interest in the subject. Simon Franklin, Emma Widdis, Rory Finnin, Jana Howlett, Caroline Humphrey, and Harald Wydra have been wonderful colleagues throughout these years.

I presented parts of this book at the brown-bag seminar of the Slavonic Department of Cambridge University, a “Found in Translation” conference at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, a Eurasian conference at Hangyang University in Seoul, and also at lively seminars at Durham, Södertörn, and Stanford. The questions and comments of colleagues in these and other places found their way into this book. Several scholars read parts of this manuscript and commented generously. They are, in chronological order, Willard Sunderland, Maria Maiofis, Simon Franklin, William Todd, Mark Bassin, Dirk Uffelmann, Marina Mogilner, Eric Naiman, David Moon, Rubén Gallo, Michael Minden, Peter Holquist, Jana Howlett, Valeria Sobol, Jane Burbank, and Tony La Vopa. Sarah Lambert, Sarah Dancy, and two anonymous reviewers of Polity Press were very helpful.

Parts of Chapters 6, 7, and 12 were published in the Russian journals, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and Ab Imperio. Part of Chapter 10 was published as “Whirling With the Other: Russian Populism and Religious Sects,” Russian Review 62 (October 2003), pp. 565–88. Part of Chapter 8 was published as “Internalizing Colonialism: Intellectual Endeavors and Internal Affairs in Mid-nineteenth Century Russia,” in Peter J. S. Dunkan (ed.), Convergence and Divergence: Russia and Eastern Europe into the Twenty-First Century (London: SSEES, 2007), pp. 103–20. Part of Chapter 5 was published as “Barrels of Fur: Natural Resources and the State in the Long History of Russia,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 2/2 (2011). Part of Chapter 12 was published as “The Shaved Man’s Burden: The Russian Novel as a Romance of Internal Colonization,” in Alastair Renfrew and Galin Tihanov (eds), Critical Theory in Russia and the West (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 124–51.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Joseph Swain, “Save me from my friends!”, 1878.

Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.

Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov, Rurik’s Arrival at Ladoga, 1909.

Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov, portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815).

Figure 5: Aleksei Olenin, Demeter–Ceres, a Greek-Roman Goddess 1812.

Figure 6: Vasilii Surikov, Ermak’s conquest of Siberia, 1895.

Figure 7: Coat of Arms of the Stroganovs, 1753.

Figure 8: The coat of arms of Abram Gannibal (c. 1742).

Figure 9: Karl Briullov, A Portrait of an Officer with his Servant (1830s).

Figure 10: Johann Reinhold Forster. The map of German colonies on the Volga,1768.

Figure 11: A cavalry training ring in Selishche, near Novgorod, built in 1818–25.

Figure 12: The Perovsky descendants of Aleksei Razumovsky (1748–1822).

Figure 13: Karl Briullov, Vasilii Perovsky on the capital of a column, 1824.

Figure 14: Pushkin and Dal presented on an icon as St Kozma and St Damyan.

Figure 15: Andrei Bolotov’s self-portrait, c. 1790.

Figure 16: Afanasii Shchapov, 1872.

Figure 17: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich, October 16, 1918.

Figure 18: Ilia Repin. Portrait of Nikolai Leskov, 1888.

Introduction

In 1927 in Moscow, Walter Benjamin noted that Russia had no use for the romantic concept of the east. “Everything in the world is here on our own soil,” his Russian friends told him. “For us there is no ‘exoticism’,” they stated; exoticism is nothing but “the counterrevolutionary ideology of a colonial nation.” But having killed the idea of the east, these intellectuals and filmmakers brought it back to life again, and on a huge scale. For their new films “the most interesting subject” was Russian peasants, a group that these intellectuals believed were deeply different from themselves: “The mode of mental reception of the peasant is basically different from that of the urban masses.” When these peasants watched films, they seemed to be incapable of following “two simultaneous narrative strands of the kind seen countless times in film. They can follow only a single series of images that must unfold chronologically.” Benjamin’s friends maintained that since peasants did not understand genres and themes “drawn from bourgeois life,” they needed an entirely new art, and creating this art constituted “one of the most grandiose mass-psychological experiments in the gigantic laboratory that Russia ha[d] become.” Despite Benjamin’s sympathies towards both the new film and the new Russia, his conclusion was wary: “The filmic colonization of Russia has misfired,” he wrote (1999: 13–14).

Studying imperial Russia, scholars have produced two stories. One concerns a great country that competes successfully, though unevenly, with other European powers, produces brilliant literature, and stages unprecedented social experiments. The other story is one of economic backwardness, unbridled violence, misery, illiteracy, despair, and collapse. I subscribe to both of these at once. In contrast to the Russian peasants whom Benjamin’s friends exoticized in line with an age-long tradition, scholars cannot afford one-track thinking. But scholarship is not a dual carriageway, either. We need to find a way to coordinate the different stories that we believe in. My solution is a kind of Eisensteinian montage interwoven with an overarching principle, which in this book is internal colonization. I propose this concept as a metaphor or mechanism that makes the Russian Empire comparable to other colonial empires of the past. So, in this book, the two Russian stories combine into one: the story of internal colonization, in which the state colonized its people.

In 1904, the charismatic historian Vasilii Kliuchevsky wrote that Russian history is “the history of a country that colonizes itself. The space of this colonization widened along with the territory of the state” (1956: 1/31).1 Coextensive with the state, self-colonization was not directed away from the state borders but expanded along with the movement of these borders, filling the internal space in waves of various intensities. At that moment, this formula of Russia’s self-colonization had already had a long history in Russian thought, which I describe in Chapter 4. Enriched by twentieth-century colonial and postcolonial experiences, we can draw further conclusions from this classical formula. Russia has been both the subject and the object of colonization and its corollaries, such as orientalism. The state was engaged in the colonization of foreign territories and it was also concerned with colonizing the heartlands. Peoples of the Empire, including the Russians, developed anti-imperial, nationalist ideas in response. These directions of Russia’s colonization, internal and external, sometimes competed and sometimes were indistinguishable. Dialectic in standstill, as Benjamin put it, but also an explosive mix that invites oxymoronic concepts such as internal colonization.

Exploring the historical experience of the Russian Empire before the revolutionary collapse of 1917, this book illuminates its relevance for postcolonial theory. However, I turn the focus onto Russia’s internal problems, which have not previously been discussed in postcolonial terms. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in the causes and results of the Russian revolution has paled in comparison to the explosion of research on the Russian Orient, orientalism, and Empire.2 Historians have learned to avoid the Soviet-style, teleological approach to the revolution and the terror that followed, which explains the preceding events as “the preparation” for the subsequent ones. However, historians – and all of us – need explanations for why the Russian revolution and the Stalinist terror occurred on the territory of the Russian Empire. Such explanations cannot be sought exclusively in the preceding era, but they, or at least a part of them, also cannot be disconnected from the historical past. I do not aim to explain the revolution, but I do believe that a better grasp of imperial Russia can help us toward a clearer understanding of the Soviet century. I am also trying to bridge the gap between history and literature, a gap that few like but many maintain. Some time ago, Nancy Condee formulated the idea that while area studies is an interdisciplinary forum, cultural studies “incorporate[s] interdisciplinarity into the project itself” (1995: 298). This book is a project in cultural studies.

Incorporating different disciplines, voices, and periods is a risky task for a cultural historian. I take courage in the idea that high literature and culture in Russia played significant roles in the political process. As I will demonstrate in several examples, “transformationist culture” was an important aspect of internal colonization. Due to a paradoxical mechanism that Michel Foucault helps to elucidate in his “repressive hypothesis” (Foucault 1998; see also Rothberg 2009), oppression made culture politically relevant and power culturally productive. For an empire such as Russia’s, its culture was both an instrument of rule and a weapon of revolution. Culture was also a screen on which the endangered society saw itself – a unique organ of self-awareness, critical feedback, warning, and mourning.

***

In Russia, social revolutions resulted in magnificent and tragic transformations. However, the continuities of this country’s geography and history have also been remarkable. Russia emerged on the international arena at the same time as the Portuguese and Spanish Empires; it grew in competition with great terrestrial empires, such as the Austrian and Ottoman in the west, the Chinese and North American in the east; it matured in competition with the modern maritime empires, the British and French; and it outlived most of them. An interesting measure, the sum total of square kilometers that an empire controlled each year over the centuries, shows that the Russian Empire was the largest in space and the most durable in time of all historical empires, covering 65 million square kilometer-years for Muskovy/Russia/Soviet Union versus 45 million for the British Empire and 30 million for the Roman Empire (Taagepera 1988). At about the time when the Russian Empire was established, the average radius of a European state was about 160 kilometers; given the speed of communication, a viable state could not dominate more than a 400-kilometer radius (Tilly 1990: 47). The distance between St. Petersburg (established in 1703) and Petropavlovsk (1740) is about 9,500 kilometers. The Empire was enormous and its problems grew with its size. But throughout the imperial period, tsars and their advisors referred to the vastness of Russia’s space as the main reason for its imperial empowerment, centralization, and further expansion.

Larger than the Soviet Union and much larger than the current Russian Federation, the Empire of the tsars stretched from Poland and Finland to Alaska, Central Asia, and Manchuria. Russian soldiers took Berlin in 1760 and Paris in 1814. After the victory over Napoleon, Russian diplomats created the Holy Alliance, the first modern attempt to integrate Europe. The Empire was constantly engaged in colonial wars over disputed domains in Europe and Asia; it oversaw the impressive advance into the Pacific; it evoked and suppressed a mutiny in the Urals, several revolts in Poland, and a permanent rebellion in the Caucasus. With the sale of Alaska in 1867, the Empire began to shrink; this tendency would continue in the twentieth century. But the Petersburg rulers dreamed about Constantinople and expansion into the Balkans and the Near East, an ambition that fueled military efforts up to World War I. The series of Russian revolutions changed both the map of Europe and the structure of the Russian state. Starting as a furious outburst of anti-imperial sentiments, the revolutions of 1917 led to new enslavement. After World War II, the growth of the Muscovite state continued when other western empires disintegrated. Even when the USSR collapsed, the loss of territory was smaller than what the western empires experienced with their decolonization. With surprise, the twenty-first century is watching the imperial resurgence of post-Soviet Russia.

The enormity of the space gives the easiest explanation for a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” as it was described by George Kennan in his famous Long Telegram (1946) that ignited the Cold War. Importantly, Kennan added that this “neurotic view” afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people. In light of the eventful time that has passed since Kennan sent his telegram off, his point can be sharpened. Throughout the larger part of Russian history, a neurotic fear, which is mixed with desire, focused not only on the enemies beyond the borders but also on the space inside them. This internal space happened to be populated, somewhat unfortunately for the rulers, by the subject peoples, Russians and non-Russians.

Led by Edward Said (1978, 1993), postcolonial scholars have emphasized the significance of oceans that separated the imperial centers from their distant colonies. In some of these writings, overseas imperialism feels different – more adventurous, consequential, and repressive – in a word, more imperialist than terrestrial imperialism. However, before railways and the telegraph, terrestrial space was less passable than the high seas. In times of peace, it was faster and cheaper to transport cargo from Archangel to London by sea than from Archangel to Moscow by land. In times of war, shipments of troops and supplies proved to travel much faster from Gibraltar to Sebastopol than from Moscow to the Crimea. In the mid-eighteenth century, the German scholar, Gerhard Friedrich Müller, led a Russian expedition to Siberia; the distance that Müller traveled there was about equal to the circumference of the Earth. In the early nineteenth century, it was four times more expensive to supply the Russian bases in Alaska by transporting food across Siberia than to carry it by sea around the world (Istoriia 1997: 239–7). It took two years for Russians to transport fur across Siberia to the Chinese border; American ships did the job in five months (Foust 1969: 321). Technically and psychologically, India was closer to London than many areas of the Russian Empire were to St. Petersburg. And there were no subjects living on the high seas, no strange, poor people who had to be defeated, tamed, settled and resettled, taxed, and conscripted. Two theoretically opposing but, in practice, curving and merging vectors of external and internal colonization competed for limited resources, human, intellectual, and financial. The oceans connected, while land divided.

Created by its rulers in their effort to make Russia a viable and competitive power, this Empire was a cosmopolitan project. Much like contemporary scholars, Russian Emperors compared Russia with other European empires. Almost until their end, the tsars focused on the troublemaking areas on Russia’s periphery and construed the core Russian population as a God-given, though limited and unreliable, resource. Having colonized its multiple territories, Russia applied typically colonial regimes of indirect rule – coercive, communal, and exoticizing – to its population. Rich in coercion and poor in capital, the Empire had to master and protect its enormous lands, which were taken for various purposes that had been largely forgotten. In Lev Tolstoy’s story, “How much land does a man need?,” a peasant goes from “overpopulated” Central Russia to a colonized steppe in Bashkiria, where friendly nomads offer him as much land as he can encircle in a day. He walks and runs from sunrise to sunset and dies of exhaustion when he completes the circle. He is buried on the spot: this, enough for a grave, is how much land man needs, says Tolstoy. But he himself bought one estate after another, subsidizing his agricultural experiments with the royalties from his novels.

Human grammar distinguishes between subject and object, while human history does not necessarily do so. Self-imposed tasks – self-discipline, internal control, colonization of one’s own kind – are inherently paradoxical. Languages, including scholarly ones, get into trouble when they confront these self-referential constructions. In the twenty-first century, scholars of globalization meet the same logical difficulties as the scholars of Russian imperial history met in the nineteenth century. Of course, I hope that the world of the future will be no more similar to imperial Russia than it will be to British India. But the experience and experiments of the Russian Empire can still teach us some lessons.

***

So, what is internal colonization – a metaphor or a mechanism? Many philosophical books argue that this is an incorrect distinction, but I do not think so. As much as I can, I am relying on the precise words of historical subjects in which they formulated their concerns. One scholar of contemporary empires states that since the concept of empire has been applied indiscriminately, the way to learn what an empire is, is to look at those who apply this word to themselves (Beissinger 2006). In a similar move, I survey the changing use of the words “colonization” and “self-colonization” in Russian historiography. Although in Russia the historical actors employed this terminology infrequently, the historical authors used it profusely, and they started to do it much earlier and with more sense than I had expected when I started this research. As a metaphor that reveals a mechanism, internal colonization is an old, well-tested tool of knowledge.

Two components always comprise colonization: culture and politics. Pure violence manifests itself in genocide, not colonization. Cultural influence leads to education, not colonization. Whenever we talk about the colonization processes, we see cultural hegemony and political domination working together in some kind of coalition, correlation, or confrontation. Jürgen Habermas speaks about internal colonization as a framework for various cognitive and even constitutional developments in modern societies. Social imperatives “make their way into the lifeworld from the outside – like colonial masters coming into a tribal society – and force a process of assimilation upon it” (1987: 2/355). Habermas’s analogy is between colonialism overseas and a monolingual European society, which assimilates modernity as if it had been introduced by colonial masters, but which actually imposes it on itself. Even in this broad usage, the concept of internal colonization presumes an aggressive confrontation of alien forces. Habermas clearly describes a cultural conflict, though this conflict is not based on ethnic or language difference.

According to classical definitions, colonization (and its ideological system, colonialism) refers to the processes of domination in which settlers migrate from the colonizing group to the colonized land, while imperialism is a form of domination that does not require resettlement (N.R. 1895; Hobson 1902; Horvath 1972). Theoretically, definitions of colonization do not specify whether any particular migration evolved within the national borders or outside them, or whether such borders even existed at the time. In practice, however, and also in intuition, colonization has usually meant travel abroad. Against this backdrop, the concept of internal colonization connotes the culture-specific domination inside the national borders, actual or imagined. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several important scholars used this concept. Prussian and German politicians launched an ambitious program of internal colonization in Eastern Europe, which was fed by all kinds of knowledge, faked and real. Russian imperial historians used the concept of “self-colonization,” producing a powerful discourse that has been largely forgotten. The ideas of one of these historians, the brilliant but maverick Afanasii Shchapov (1830–76), expose themselves intermittently in my book.

Following the Russian revolution and decolonization of the Third World, the concept of internal colonization took a long break. In 1951, Hannah Arendt (1970) introduced the concept of the colonial boomerang, the process in which imperial powers bring their practices of coercion from their colonies back home. A few years later, Aimé Césaire (1955) formulated a similar concept, the reverse shock of imperialism, which he saw in the Holocaust. After 1968, social scientists reinvented the concept of internal colonization with the aim of applying postcolonial language to the internal problems of metropolitan countries. The American sociologist Robert Blauner (1969) looked at aspects of the domestic situation of African Americans, such as ghetto life and urban riots, as processes of internal colonization. In his lectures of 1975–6, the French philosopher Michel Foucault used the same concept in the broader sense of bringing colonial models of power back to the west (2003: 103). The British sociologist Michael Hechter (1975) used the concept of internal colonialism in his book about the core and periphery of the British Isles, with a particular focus on Welsh politics. Revising the classical concept, Hechter neutralized the geographical distance between the colonizer and the colonized, formerly the definitive feature of British-style colonialism. However, in his case studies, he still needed the ethnic difference between the mother country and the colony (say, between the English and the Welsh) to make his concept work. After Hechter, the next step was to deconstruct ethnic difference, revealing the internal colonialism inside the mosaic ethnic field that is structured by cultural reifications of power. In this meaning, concepts of internal colonization/colonialism were used by the historian Eugen Weber (1976), the sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner (1977), the anthropologist James C. Scott (1998), the literary scholar Mark Netzloff (2003), and a group of medievalists (Fernández-Armesto and Muldoon 2008). In her book on mid-twentieth-century French culture, the historian Kristin Ross observed how France turned to “a form of interior colonialism” when “rational administrative techniques developed in the colonies were brought home” (1996: 7). Several critics reviewed the idea of internal colonization, usually with mixed feelings (Hind 1984; Love 1989; Liu 2000; Calvert 2001). Some prominent historians have mentioned the colonial nature of Russia’s internal rule but have never elaborated on this thesis (Braudel 1967: 62; Rogger 1993; Ferro 1997: 49; Lieven 2003: 257; Snyder 2010: 20, 391). Postcolonial studies all but ignore the Russian aspect of their larger story. In studies of Russian literature and history, however, the concept of internal colonization has been discussed by several authors (Groys 1993; Etkind 1998, 2002, 2007; Kagarlitsky 2003; Viola 2009; Condee 2009).

Developing this worldly concept, I wish to combine it with more traditional, text-oriented concerns of cultural history. This is a triple task – historical, cultural, and political. As a Russian specialist, I cannot agree more with Ann Laura Stoler who specializes in Southeast Asia: “[T]he omission of colonialisms (internal or otherwise) from national histories is political through and through” (2009: 34). However, I demonstrate that this omission has never been complete in classic Russian historiography. It is necessary to understand the political reasons for both the presence and the omission of internal colonization in the national and imperial historiography. Chapter 5, probably the most controversial in this book, historicizes twenty-first-century Russia in a deep, longue durée way by moving from cultural history to political economy. I have no intention of finding an invariable condition that spans through centuries, but I do strive to understand the recurrent interplays between the contingent factors of geography, ecology, and politics that shaped Russia’s experience. As has happened in other spheres of postcolonial studies, my focus in this book shifts from describing historical events and social practices of the imperial past to engaging with cultural texts that depicted this past before me, the texts that define our very ability to imagine this past along with its events and practices. This shift structures this book thematically and chronologically.

Chapters 1 and 2 expose the Cold War context of Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” and complement Said by following some of his heroes through their Russian adventures. In Chapter 3, I dig into the debates on the origins of the Russian monarchy, as they articulated the nature of Russia’s internal colonization. Chapter 4 traces the robust self-colonization paradigm in the mainstream historiography of Russia, as it developed in the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 discusses the fuel of Russia’s pre-modern boom, the fur trade, which established the enormous territory that later underwent troubles, schisms, and recolonizations. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the peculiar institutions of this colonization, such as estate and commune. Constructing an analogy between the classical problems of race and the Russian construction of estate, I invite the reader to St. Petersburg to follow its transformation from a colonial outpost into the wonder of the Enlightenment. Chapter 8 examines the fierce intellectual activities of a ruling institution of imperial Russia, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The last part of this book consists of case studies in the cultural history of the Empire. Chapter 9 examines an unexpected figure, Immanuel Kant, during his period as a Russian subject. I take issue with the recent criticism of Kant as ignorant or insensitive toward colonial oppression. On the contrary, my perspective presents him as an early (post)colonial thinker. In Chapter 10, I look at the Russian religious movements and explore their revolutionary connections, mythical and real. Exoticizing the people and construing their “underground life,” the late nineteenth-century missionaries, historians, and ethnographers ascribed to them the most unbelievable features; as a result, populists and socialists counted on these popular sects in the self-imposed task of the revolution, which was no less incredible. Chapter 11 compares the anti-imperial narratives of two major authors that were, in their different ways, both fascinated with imperial Russia and sharply critical toward it, Joseph Conrad and Nikolai Leskov. Using three classical texts, Chapter 12 explores the Russian novel as a sacrificial mechanism that re-enacts the changing relations between classes and genders within the Empire. This chapter combines Mikhail Bakhtin’s and René Girard’s theoretical perspectives on the novel with the historical context of internal colonization. Throughout this book, I place some great names, Russian and western – Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Kant and Conrad – in unusual contexts; I also introduce a number of figures that may be less known to the reader. Ever concerned about territory, colonization is about people. Proponents, victims, and heretics of colonizations internal or external, the protagonists of this book constitute a multicolored, paradoxical crowd.

Notes

1 Here and elsewhere, the translation is mine unless stated otherwise. I refer to multi-volume editions by volume/page, e.g. 1/31.

2 This literature is too large to be surveyed here. On the Russian east, I benefited in particular from the now classical Brower and Lazzerini 1997; Barrett 1999; Bassin 1999; Geraci 2001. On orientalism in Russia, see Layton 1994; Sahni 1997; Khalid et al. 2000; Sopelnikov 2000; Thompson 2000; Collier et al. 2003; Ram 2003; Tolz 2005; Schimmelpenninck 2010. On the Russian Empire in comparative perspective, see Burbank and Ransel 1998; Lieven 2003; Gerasimov et al. 2004, 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010.

Part I: The Non-Traditional Orient

1

Less than One and Double

On March 25, 1842, in St. Petersburg, one official lost his nose. This noseless person, Kovalev, had just returned from the Caucasus, the embattled southern border of the Russian Empire. In the imperial capital, he was seeking a promotion that would put him in charge of a nice, bribable province of central Russia. But Kovalev’s nose betrayed him. His face was flat. Without his nose, he could not visit his women. He even missed a job interview, so strong was the shame of being noseless. Finally, his nose was captured on its way to Riga, the western border of the Empire. “Russia is a wonderful country,” wrote Nikolai Gogol who composed this story. “One has only to mention an official” and all his peers, administrators “from Riga to Kamchatka,” unanimously believe that “you are talking about them” (Gogol 1984: 3/42). From the Caucasus to St. Petersburg and from Riga to Kamchatka: it’s a long trip for a nose.

Career of Improvement

Gogol’s “The Nose” is a beautiful example of what Homi Bhabha calls the “colonial doubling,” which summarizes the processes of loss, splitting, and reconfiguration that are essential for the colonial situation. We can lose a part in many interesting ways, from castration, or decolonization, or even from shaving, or some combination of these. Presenting a faceless colonial administrator, Gogol analyzes his nose as an imperial fetish, a “metonymy of presence” where presence is unreachable and its signs, unrecognizable. Indeed, for Kovalev, there was no presence without his nose. Without the part, everything that the whole required – office, power, women – became unreachable. When in its proper place, the nose is just a little part of Kovalev’s wholeness, a metonymy of his impeccable functioning as the corporeal and imperial subject. Lost, the nose turns into the all-embracing symbol for Kovalev’s unaccomplished dreams and aspirations, the summary metaphor for all those goods, bodies, and statuses – vice-governorship, fortunate bride, social pleasures – which are unreachable for the noseless. The part is made into a fetish only after it has been lost. The Hegelian relations of master and slave are analogous to Gogolian relations of the whole and the part. As long as the part is the slave of the whole, the order is safe; but the rebellion of the part has more dramatic effects than the rebellion of the slave, because it questions the deepest, the most naturalized perceptions of the social order. Colonial differences cross-penetrate all social bodies, including the body of Kovalev. Together, Kovalev and his separatist nose make a wonderful illustration for the enigmatic, Gogolian formula that Bhabha repeats without explaining: “less than one and double” (Bhabha 1994: 130, 166).

An imperial author with an exemplary biography, Gogol was born in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg where he failed first as an official and then as a historian, succeeded as a writer, and failed again as a political thinker. He belongs to the list of great colonial authors, along with James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. The plot of Dead Souls was an imperial project; with his Napoleonic look, the protagonist Chichikov plans to resettle the purchased peasants to a recently colonized land near Kherson in the southern steppe and to mortgage them to the state. The fact that the peasants were dead makes their transportation easier. Kherson was the land of the notorious Potemkin villages, but the internal provinces that Chichikov visited on his way were no more trustworthy. Dead Souls should be read as the saga of Russia’s colonization, a text on a par with the British Robinson Crusoe or the American Moby Dick. When Gogol’s Inspector-General went on stage in 1836, hostile critics targeted precisely this colonial aspect of Gogol’s inspiration. These horrible events could never have happened in central Russia, only in Ukraine or Belorussia; or even worse, continued a critic, they could have happened “only on the Sandwich Islands that captain Cook visited” (Bulgarin 1836). With and without their lost noses and dead souls, Gogol’s characters were precise images “of a post-Enlightenment man tethered to … his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence … repeats his action at a distance” (Bhabha 1994: 62). The colonial nature of Gogol’s inspiration has been emphasized by a more recent wave of scholarship, which was itself inspired by the post-Soviet transformation of Ukraine (Shkandrij 2001; Bojanowska 2007). Understandably, postcolonial scholars have focused on Gogol’s Ukrainian roots and stories. The colonial nature of his works on Russia and the Russians, such as “The Nose” and Dead Souls, have eluded them, because such an understanding requires the concept of internal colonization. I believe that postcolonial criticism clarifies Gogol, but the opposite is also true: Gogol helps us to understand Bhabha.

In 1835, when Gogol was teaching Universal History at St. Petersburg Imperial University and Kovalev was starting his service in the Caucasus, Lord Macaulay delivered his Minute on Indian Education. Working for the Viceroy of India, Macaulay argued that only teaching English to the Indian elite would create the “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.” He referred to Russia as the positive model:

Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance. … I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions. … There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. (Macaulay 1862: 109–10)

For Macaulay, the west and the east were but steps on the worldwide ladder of history. Where England was in the tenth century, Russia was in the eighteenth and Punjab in the nineteenth. In this vision, the higher stages smoothly replaced the lower ones in the mother country. In the large space of empire, these different stages of progress all coexisted; moreover, they became known to the politician mainly because of their coexistence in the imperial domain rather than because of their obscure traces in the national archive. In India and Russia, higher races, castes, and estates cohabited with lower ones. The imperial task was to make order out of this chaos, which meant creating categories, managing hierarchies, regulating distances. After Peter the Great, “the languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindu what they have done for the Tartar,” said Macaulay.

A few years later, the leading Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote that, without Peter the Great, Russia “would probably still have accepted European civilization but it would have done so in the same way in which India adopted the English one” (1954: 5/142). In other words, Belinsky saw Russia’s westernization as a response to the anxiety of being colonized by the west, though of course this anxiety was also a European influence, one of those languages that Russia, like India, imported from the west. As a matter of fact, India was a colony and Russia was an empire, which made Macaulay’s comparison a little forced; what is interesting is that he did not notice it. For Belinsky and his readers, Russia’s sovereignty – its difference from India – was the crucial fact. The imperial gradient between the higher and lower groups was immense in the British and Russian Empires; in the former the difference was mainly between the mother country and the colony, while in the latter the difference was mainly between groups within the mother country. Although straight in the national domain, the line of progress curved and folded within its imperial possessions. Later, Marxist theorists struggled with the same issue. Lev Trotsky called it “combined and uneven development” (1922, 1959). In his vision, advanced and backward societies coexisted in Russia simultaneously and “traumatically”; their contradictions would “inevitably” result in a revolution (Knei-Paz 1978: 95).

During the High Imperial Period, which lasted from Russia’s victory in the Napoleonic War (1814) to its defeat in the Crimean War (1856), the Russian educated class spoke and wrote French as well as Russian. German was a heritage language for many, and English was for the crème de la crème. The famous works of Russian literature depicted this polyglossia and were often inspired by French examples (Meyer 2009). In Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin (1832), Tatiana’s letter of love was written in French. Typical for ladies of high society, Tatiana’s Russian was worse than her French, explained Pushkin. French was the language of women and family life; Russian was the language of men, of the military service and the household economy where work was carried out by serfs and soldiers. In Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), where the action takes place during the Napoleonic War, the officers and officials who were fighting with the French speak French with their wives and daughters, Russian to their subordinates, and mix the languages when talking to their peers. Unlike Pushkin, who in his novel “translated” Tatiana’s letter into Russian verse, Tolstoy wrote these long dialogues in French and published them with no translation, expecting his readers to understand them. But his public was changing rapidly and within a few years he had to translate these French sections into Russian for the next edition of his masterpiece.

After reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a former officer of the Imperial Guard, Petr Chaadaev, asked in 1836: Does Russia also have a destiny? His answer was devastating: “We live in our houses as if we are stationed there; in our families we have the outlook of foreigners; in our cities we are similar to nomads, we are worse than nomads.” At exactly the time when the Empire was as rich and large as never before, the imperial elite felt as if they were invaders stationed in their own cities, homes, and lives. “Our remembrances do not go deeper than yesterday; we are foreign to ourselves. … Our experiences disappear as we are moving ahead. This is a natural consequence of a culture that is entirely borrowed and imitated” (Chaadaev 1914: 110). Illustrating his thesis, Chaadaev compared the Russians to the Native Americans. He asserted that there were “people of outstanding depth” among the Native Americans, but the Russians had no sages who could be compared to these natives (Chaadaev 1914: 116; Etkind 2001b: 24). These feelings of the foreignness in the native land, the stoppage of time, and the imitative character of culture were subjective components of reversed, internal orientalism (Condee 2009: 27).

Chaadaev wrote his epistle in French, but when it was published in Russian translation, it caused a scandal. Denouncing Chaadaev, one official with Siberian experience wrote that he “denies everything to us, puts us lower than the American savages” (Vigel 1998: 78). Awakened by Chaadaev, a group of intellectuals turned his cultural criticism into the call for nationalist reawakening. Having adopted an unfortunate name, the Slavophiles, they reinvented the global language of anti-imperial protest that was rooted in the French Enlightenment, the American Revolution, Edmund Burke’s criticism of British policies in India, the experience of the Napoleonic wars, and, last but not least, the Polish rebellions against the Russian Empire.

In 1836, Gogol described St. Petersburg as “something similar to a European colony in America: there are as few people of the native ethnicity here [St. Petersburg] and as many foreigners who have not yet been amalgamated into the solid mass” (1984: 6/162). Like many Russian intellectuals of his time, Gogol was very interested in America and even dreamed about emigration to the US. Comparing the imperial capital to America sounded good to this outsider. In a remarkable twist, the conservative Russians of the 1840s employed the language of colonial discontent for their criticism against their own culture. A former officer of the Imperial Guard, Aleksei Khomiakov, wrote in 1845 that in Russia, the Enlightenment took “a colonial character.” In 1847, he characterized the educated society in Russia as “a colony of eclectic Europeans, thrown into a country of savages.” He also stated that the enlightened Russia “fashioned itself in an aggressive way, like a European colony anywhere in the world, conceiving the conquest with best intentions but without means to realize them and … without a superiority of spirit that could give some kind of justification for the conquest.” He characterized this “colonial relationship” as “the struggle” between “the entirely unjustified repulsion” on the part of the elite toward the people and “the well-justified suspicion” on the part of the people towards the elite. On this base, Khomiakov diagnosed in the Russian society “fundamental doubling,” “imitativeness,” “false half-knowledge,” “a lifeless orphanhood,” and “cerebral deadliness.” Like his favorite writer, Gogol, he loved the metaphor of doubling/splitting (razdvoenie) and used it profusely. Doubling was induced by the Petrine reforms but increased after that. Doubling was an unavoidable result of too abrupt, too rapid social change. Doubling separated the life of the people and the life of the higher estates. “Where the society is doubled – a deadly formalism reigns the day” (Khomiakov 1988: 100, 43, 152, 96, 139). Much earlier, Khomiakov (1832) wrote a tragedy about the legendary Ermak, a Cossack who conquered Siberia for the Russian crown. Far from glorifying Ermak, it shows a repenting criminal, cursed by his father, convicted by the Tsar, and betrayed by the fellow Cossacks. A Shaman offers him the crown of Siberia, but he prefers suicide. If it were a story about Montezuma, it would have been perceived as an early and strong anti-imperial statement; Ermak has never been successful on stage, with either the critics or the historians. Khomiakov spent many years writing a multi-volume saga of peoples’ migrations and resettlements, starting from the antiquity. An Anglophone and Anglophile, he speculated about the colonized Celts, Indians, and Hottentots. Colonial practices were in his mind, whether he was writing about Russia or the world. One of the most gifted people of his time – an amateur engineer, artist, historian, and theologian – Khomiakov was piously Orthodox, like other Slavophiles, but in his own creative way (Engelstein 2009). Through the years, he corresponded with a cleric from Oxford about a unification of Orthodox and Anglican churches; he even believed that the same could happen with the Calvinists (Khomiakov 1871: 105).

While the British administration was introducing English in Indian schools, Macaulay’s Russian counterpart, the Minister of the Enlightenment Sergei Uvarov, decided that the Europeanization of Russia had gone too far. Reporting in 1843 about the first decade of his ministerial job, he saw his success in “healing the new generation of its blind, thoughtless predisposition towards the foreign and the superficial” (Uvarov 1864). Remarkably, Uvarov drafted his projects for the new “national” education in French but then switched to Russian (Zorin 1997). A dilettante orientalist but a professional administrator, Uvarov was responding to a wave of popular sentiment that was universal for post-Napoleonic Europe.

A long time has passed since Macaulay and Uvarov planned to re-educate their spacious domains. As in India, nationalism in Russia took two competing forms, rebellious and anti-imperial on the one hand, official and pre-emptive on the other. If Peter I was a model for Macaulay, Lev Tolstoy was an influence on Mahatma Gandhi. Russia was a great European power alongside those of Britain or France, and a territory that received its civilization from the west, like Africa or India. This is why Macaulay compared the Russian Empire not to the British Empire but to its colony, India. It was to the Russians themselves and not to the Poles or the Aleuts, that the Empire was teaching French with the success that Macaulay wanted to emulate and Uvarov to unwind. This success did not last long, but it was important for all aspects of imperial culture and politics. It divided the intellectuals into those who mourned the lost originality of native ways and those who welcomed the bursting creativity of cultural hybridization, a divide well known to the scholars of colonial cultures. “Learning is nothing but imitation,” proclaimed a leading academic historian, Sergei Soloviev, whose son, Vladimir, became the most original Russian philosopher (1856: 501). Through the High Imperial Period, the understanding of Russia as an imperial and a colonial country was shared even by those who did not have much else in common. A late and revisionist follower of the Slavophiles, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1860 that no country is less understood than Russia; even the moon is better explored, wrote Dostoevsky, who was in the know: he had just been released from a Siberian prison camp. In his vision, the people of Russia were sphinx-like – mysterious and omniscient; he called on his public to approach the people with an Oedipal feeling of awe (1993: 12–13). The philosopher and governmental official, Konstantin Kavelin, used the same colonial rhetoric in 1866, justifying the slow pace of the reforms that he helped to write into the law: “Imagine a colonist who starts a household in the wilderness. … Whatever he did his success would not be able to stand comparison with the life standard of a town. … We are the very same colonists” (Kavelin 1989: 182).

Slavic Wilderness

The fierce, transnational polemics that raged between Marxists at the turn of the twentieth century alerted them to the relation between imperialism and national economies. The polemics had a critical stance; many believed that Marx did not understand this relationship. The Russian economist Petr Struve emphasized the “third persons,” neither capitalists nor workers, who complicated the class war. Living pre-capitalist lives, these “third persons” consumed the “surplus product” of the economy and provided capitalism with labor and growth (Struve 1894). Responding to this argument, the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg stated that foreign markets play this role far better than Struve’s internal “third persons.” According to Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital (2003), capitalism would always need fresh markets and, therefore, is inescapably connected to imperialism. Thus, a struggle against capital is also a struggle against the empire. In memorable words, Hannah Arendt observed that by synthesizing two programs of emancipation, social democratic and anti-imperialist, this Marxist message had made recurrent waves throughout our world: “[E]very New Left movement, when its moment came to change into Old Left – usually when its members reached the age of forty – promptly buried its early enthusiasm for Rosa Luxemburg together with the dreams of youth” (1968: 38).

In response to Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, in his early book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, suggested that in larger countries such as Russia and the United States, the unevenness of development plays the role of global inequality, so that the colonization of these internal spaces would consume the “surplus product” and give a boost to capitalist development. Internal inequalities would play the same role as external ones. Speaking of the underdeveloped Russian territories on the Volga, in Siberia, and elsewhere, Lenin used the concepts of “internal colonization” and “internal colony” (1967: 3/593–6). Responding to his opponents, “legal Marxists” like Struve, Lenin discussed not only the flows of capital, but also the demographical patterns of peasant migrations into the territories of internal colonization. With no hesitation, Lenin applied this concept, internal colony, to those parts of Russia that were populated by ethnic Russians, such as the steppes of Novorossiysk and the forests of Archangel; territories with mixed and changing population, such as Siberia and the Crimea; and lands with ethnically alien peoples, such as Georgia. In Lenin’s account, his own homeland on the Volga was one of these internal colonies. He based his speculations about “the internal colonization” and “the progressive mission of capitalism” on a systematic analogy between the Russian Empire and the US, which he abandoned a few years later (Etkind 2001b).

In the US, W. E. B. DuBois wrote about American underprivileged minorities, social and racial alike, in colonial terms: “[T]here are groups of people who occupy the quasi-colonial status: laborers who are settled in the slums of large cities; groups like Negroes … ” (cited in Gutiérrez 2004). Both Lenin and DuBois imported the concept of internal colonization from the Prussian bureaucratic language, where it meant the state-sponsored program of managing the frontier between Prussia and “the Slavic wilderness” to the east. The German colonization of Polish and Baltic lands started in the Middle Ages and was consistently pursued by Frederick the Great. Prussian and, then, German officials called this policy “the program of inner colonization.” Starting in the 1830s, the Prussian government disbursed millions of marks for the purchase of Polish manors, dividing them and leasing them to German farmers. Under Bismarck, this policy was strengthened with restrictions for seasonal workers, the introduction of passport control, and even deportations of Slavs from Prussia (Koehl 1953; Brubaker 1992: 131; Dabag et al. 2004: 46; Nelson 2009). Remarkably, the leading figure of these events, Max Sering, found his inspiration in his trip to the American Midwest; in 1883, he returned to Prussia with a determination to organize a similar frontier along the German borders with the east. In 1912, he visited Russia (Nelson 2010). In 1886, the Royal Prussian Colonization Commission was established and the imperial intellectuals started debating what kind of colonization Germany needed: an African-style “overseas colonization” or a Polish-style “inner colonization.” Advising on these efforts, Max Weber published a survey, in which he recommended his own version of internal colonization of the “barbarian East” (Paddock 2010: 77). In this work, Weber collaborated with one of the leaders of the colonization movement, Gustav Schmoller, though their ways parted later on. An historian, Schmoller looked back at the Prussian colonization in the east, Drang nach Osten, and emphasized the settlement programs of Frederick the Great, which he also called ‘inner colonization’ (Schmoller 1886; Zimmerman 2006). This historical retrospective, mythologized to a large extent, was crucial for the political plans of Prussian internal colonizers: it was the historical precedence of the earlier colonization that made these newest efforts “inner” and therefore different from British overseas imperialism. But, as we shall see in Chapter 7, historical examples of German colonization spread very far to the east, as far as the Volga river.

During World War I, the Prussian enthusiasts of internal colonization indulged in “a dream spree of wide proportions,” envisioning large-scale colonization of the occupied Polish and Ukrainian lands (Koehl 1953). But soon this policy, which would have outraced Russia using Russia’s method of contiguous expansion, became insufficient for the wildest dreamers. The Nazis rejected the idea and practice of internal colonization; their ambition was to create an entirely new space of colonial, ethnically purged Eastern Europe, a project which Hitler compared to the European conquest of America (Blackbourn 2009; Kopp 2011; Baranowski 2011). Rejecting Bismarck’s legacy that he associated with internal colonization, Hitler opted for external colonization, not in Africa, however, but in Eurasia: “If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only to the extent of Russia.” When political dreams outpaced historical precedents, the very distinction between the external and the internal had to be overcome. Describing his thoughts in Munich of 1912, Hitler called the plan of Germany’s internal colonization a pacifist and Jewish idea:

For us Germans the slogan of “inner colonization” is catastrophic. … It is no accident that it is always primarily the Jew who tries and succeeds in planting such mortally dangerous modes of thought in our people. … Any German internal colonization … can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil. (Hitler 1969: 125, 128)

Boomerang Effect

In the 1920s, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci characterized the relations between different regions of his country, the north and the south, as colonial exploitation. Better than his predecessors, he realized the internal complexity of this intra-ethnic colonization. Its cultural vector, which he called hegemony, diverged from its political vector (domination) and its economic vector (exploitation). All three had to be considered separately, because their directions were different or even the opposite. Regions of southern Italy became northern Italy’s “exploited colonies” but, at the same time, the culture of the south strongly influenced that of the north (Gramsci 1957: 28, 48). In fact, it was due to the internal structure of Italian colonialism that Gramsci was able to separate these elements of power, which correlate and stick to each other in many situations of external, overseas colonization. Revising the Marxist teaching that the economic basis determines the “superstructure,” Gramscian concepts of hegemony and domination proved to be seminal for cultural and postcolonial studies. Conceived in Italy, they have been applied in India and elsewhere (Guha 1997).

Speculating about the relations between “power,” which in her writing was close to hegemony, and violence, Hannah Arendt described the “boomerang effect” that an imperial government would bring to the mother country from the colonies if the violence against the “subject races” spread to the imperial nation, so that “the last ‘subject race’ would be the English themselves.” Arendt suggested that some British imperial administrators (she referred to Lord Cromer) were aware of the boomerang of violence, and this “much-feared effect” constrained their actions in India or Africa (Arendt 1970: 54). With its aboriginal roots, the boomerang metaphor summarized the old, Kantian nightmare that the European peoples would be ruled as if they were savages who could not rule themselves. Anthropologists have repeatedly stressed the role of European colonies as “the laboratories of modernity,” which tested the newest technologies of power (Stoler 1995: 17). When the mother countries implemented selected methods of colonial power at home, they appropriately adjusted their functions. The project of the Panopticon, which was first devised as a factory by the adventurous Brits in a Russian colony in Ukraine and later used as a prison in England and elsewhere, is a good example of this creative process (see Chapter 7).

This boomerang imagery was crucial for Arendt’s major contribution, Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), which surveyed the Soviet and Nazi regimes under one cover along with a variety of western colonies. Despite the long-standing fascination with Arendt’s theoretical ideas, this part of her legacy has been discussed primarily by her earliest as well as her most recent critics (Pietz 1988; Rothberg 2009; Mantena 2010). Still, with one significant exception (Boym 2010), the scholarship on Arendt’s Origins focuses on its German story and downplays the massive Russian-Soviet part of this study. Indeed, Arendt’s focus on the pan-Slavic movement as a step in the development of Russian and European racism was not productive for her project. The pan-Slavic movement was a dead-end; it did not lead to the Russian revolution and Soviet totalitarianism in the way that Arendt described. Arendt’s idea of the boomerang effect was brilliant, but in application to Russia it needed mediation by an understanding of Russian imperialism as an internal, and not only external, affair. The long-standing traditions of violence and coercion with which the Russian Empire treated its own peasantry could explain the revolution and totalitarianism as a boomerang coming home to the cities, the capitals, and the state. The revolutionary state absorbed the practices and experiences that the Empire projected onto its subject peoples, including the Russians. Unlike the German boomerang that, according to Arendt, flew back across the high seas from the colonies to the heartlands, the Russian boomerang whirled through the internal machinery of the empire. Totalitarianism, Soviet style, was a logical result of this effect.

Talking about the influx of race imagery from the colonies to Europe during the English and French revolutions, Michel Foucault generalized:

It should never be forgotten that while colonization … transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West. … A whole series of the colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself. (2003: 103)

I believe that this combination of concepts, the boomerang effect that Foucault probably borrowed from Arendt, and the internal colonialism that he improvised here though rarely used elsewhere, is productive for understanding Russia’s extraordinary history. This claim finds much support in Russian sources. One hundred years earlier than Foucault, the Russian provincial administrator and satirical writer Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote a collection of essays, Gentlemen from Tashkent, which analyzed essentially the same processes, the boomerang effect and internal colonialism, in the Russian life of the time. Tashkent, now in Uzbekistan, was taken by Russian troops in 1865 and became the center of a huge colonial domain (Sahadeo 2007). Saltykov-Shchedrin chose this event, the largest success of Russian imperialism, for a demonstration of its destructive effect on the policies and mores in the Russian heartland. Returning from Tashkent, the Caucasus, and other “tamed” places, the imperial officers and officials brought their skills and lust for violence home, to St. Petersburg and the provinces. The gentlemen from Tashkent call themselves “civilizers,” wrote Saltykov-Shchedrin; in fact, they are a “moving nightmare” that permeates every corner of life. A typical such gentleman had “civilized” Poland even before his stay in Tashkent, but it is there that he would receive a critical experience that enabled him to “civilize” Russia. In several funny stories, the gentlemen from Tashkent beat and bribe the gentlemen in Petersburg, assuming it as a part of their civilizing mission. If you find yourself in a town that has a prison and does not have a school, you are in the heart of Tashkent, wrote the satirist. Like Major Kovalev who lost his nose when he returned from the Caucasus, the imperial returnees confront a catastrophe that they purposefully create and deeply misunderstand. Focusing on the return arc of the imperial boomerang, from the colony to the mother country, Saltykov-Shchedrin defined the internal Orient – in his terms, “Tashkent-ness” – as a combination of violence and ignorance that he discerned in the exchange between the Russian center and its colonies (Saltykov-Shchedrin 1936: 10/29–280).

Two great struggles, inconsistent but emancipatory, dominated the end of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first century: decolonization of the Third World and de-Sovietization of the Second World. Historically, these two struggles have been intertwined. Intellectually, they have been kept separate. But starting from the age of the Enlightenment, academic history has experienced its own boomerang effect: the knowledge of the colonization and decolonization processes in the east illuminates the understanding of the west.