Abstract
Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011; 203 pp.; US$99.00 hbk; ISBN: 9780199594443
For scholars of European imperialism the Russian Empire and Soviet Union pose a challenge. Straddling the border between Europe and Asia, its history shaped by centuries of encounters with its eastern and southern neighbors, Russia was both an agent of European imperialism and an orient in its own right, stigmatized as not fully Western, not fully civilized. These strains of ambiguity have complicated attempts to include Russia in the post-colonial critique of imperialism, most vividly exemplified in the work of Edward Said. Lively debates have arisen over the extent to which Said’s Orientalism is applicable in the Russian context. Generally, scholars engaged in regional studies have tended to look with favor on Said, while those focusing on the production of knowledge adopted more nuanced views. Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient is an excellent example of the latter genre. She examines a group of St. Petersburg scholars whose professional activities fall outside the patterns of Western orientalism and whose writings anticipate key elements of Saidian post-colonial criticism.
Tolz’s group of orientologists (she prefers not to call them orientalists) were trained by Baron Viktor Romanovich Rozen, Professor of Arabic in the Faculty of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University, a talented scholar and administrator active from the 1870s until his death in 1908. Rozen’s disciples, most notably Vasilii Bartold, Nikolai Marr, Sergei Oldenburg and FedorShcherbatskoi, built prominent careers extending well into the Soviet period. Firmly entrenched in key academic positions, Rozen and his students dominated studies of Russia’s orient and represented the field in the international arena. Despite their broad array of interests, their work reveals common ideas, making it possible to speak of them as a distinct school. Tolz places these ideas at the forefront of her study, which she organizes along rigorously thematic lines.
Tolz starts with the concepts of empire and nation. Baron Rozen was, in Tolz’s words, an empire saver, a firm supporter of the Russian empire as a conveyer of enlightenment and progress. Yet he was also a nation builder. Civilizing the natives did not mean, in his view, stripping them of their identity. On the contrary, Rozen and his disciples saw ethno-national consciousness as an essential element of civilization, necessary both for collective advancement and individual wellbeing. These attitudes put the Rozen school at odds both with advocates of Russification at home and with their fellow orientalists abroad. Where Western scholars fixated on the irreducible otherness of their oriental subjects, the Rozen school saw common ground, calling into question the stark dichotomy of East and West. Members of the Rozen school likewise valued Eastern civilizations not merely as historical artifacts, but as vital living cultures. Russian orientologists played, in fact, a pivotal role in the emergence of native intelligentsias. By working with local intellectuals not merely as informants but as genuine collaborators, Russian scholars fostered cadres of native leaders whose interests extended well beyond scholarship to national revival.
The involvement of the Rozen school with leaders of indigenous movements illustrates their complex attitude toward political power. Rozen and his colleagues at St. Petersburg University firmly resisted calls to abandon pure science and redirect their efforts toward the practical needs of colonial administration. Nonetheless, they were firm believers in the equation of knowledge and power: science, they felt, was essential to the governance of native peoples. Tsarist authorities showed little interest in their expertise, but the Soviet regime had a different view. The Bolsheviks broke sharply with Tsarist practices and adopted a nationality policy that echoed the ideas of the Rozen school. Obliged to adapt to a Marxist ideological framework, orientologists such as Nikolai Marr and Sergei Oldenburg sharpened previous criticisms into a full-blown condemnation of Western scholarship as an instrument of bourgeois imperialism. But the symbiosis of orientology and Soviet power would prove to be tragically short-lived. By the end of the 1920s, the Rozen school had come under attack along with much of pre-revolutionary Russian academia. Prominent scholars lost their positions; some were arrested, while their local associates, branded bourgeois nationalists, fell victim en masse to Stalin’s purges. By the Second World War little remained of the Rozen school. Still, not all was lost. Arab intellectuals studying in the Soviet Union in the 1950s came in contact with the writings of Rozen’s disciples. One such scholar, Anwar Abdel-Malek, borrowed directly from Oldenburg’s critiques in his 1963 essay ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, which in turn influenced the developing ideas of Edward Said. Thus, Tolz asserts, not only did Russian orientologists of the Rozen school anticipate important aspects of post-colonial criticism; there was even a direct line of transmission.
Tolz’s work is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on orientalist scholarship throughout Europe. By closely examining the ideas and accomplishments of the Rozen school, she crafts a compelling view of the relationship between academic expertise and imperial power. There are, however, a few places in which the limits of Tolz’s investigation leave broader questions unanswered. Tolz’s decision to single out a particular group of scholars has clear advantages, but in focusing so narrowly on the Rozen school, Tolz fails to address the character of Russian orientology as a whole, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether her conclusions can be generalized. Likewise, by depicting the Rozen school as post-colonial critics avant la lettre,Tolz avoids the need to spell out more clearly her own attitude toward post-colonial scholarship in general and Edward Said in particular. In effect, she carves out an exclusion zone for her scholars, to whom the Saidian paradigm obviously does not apply, while implicitly validating the model as a whole. Perhaps this is justified, but the choice is not explained. Thus, while Russia’s Own Orient has considerably enriched and advanced the literature on scholarship and imperialism in Russia, much remains to be discussed.