Abstract
As Ella Shohat (1992) argues, it is hard to find a territory on Earth which has not been colonized or colonizing. However, the concepts of colonialism and colonization are still used within rigid chronological and geographical settings. Colonialism is understood basically as an expansion of Western European power during the 16th to 20th centuries into overseas colonies. Colonial and postcolonial studies remain largely western academic enterprise, through which these countries rethink their relations with their former colonies, omitting or marginalizing the role of Russia.
The arguments of water and pigment are typically brought to support these claims. The water argument, broadly perceived, states that the real colonies were far away, separated from the home country by large bodies of water. The pigment argument claims that there were obvious racial differences between colonized and colonizer. For long time, these arguments have been shaping the understanding of classical western overseas colonialism, and disqualifying Russia from the category of colonial powers.
Recent academic research increasingly focuses on the concepts of both continental and internal colonialism. Continental colonialism (German expansion eastwards, Russia’s expansion to the Far East, the Caucasus, Central Asia and partly to Eastern Europe) refers to the situation when both colonized and colonizer are on the same continent. Internal colonialism refers to the situation in which both colonized and colonizer are in the same country. The Petrine reforms in Russia, Kemalist reforms in Turkey and the building of a centralized state in France may be considered as variations of internal colonialism.
Russia’s continental colonialism, i.e. its expansion into the Far East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, has been covered by recent academic research (Bassin, 2006; Khodarkovsky, 2002; Layton, 1994; Slezkine, 1994; Thompson, 2000, among others). Etkind’s book Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience examines Russia’s internal colonial processes and practices, directed not to the frontiers, but to the heartlands of empire. The author interprets the Petrine reforms as a powerful act of self-colonization, when Russian elites increasingly shaped and reinvented themselves according to western models and increasingly applied ‘typically colonial regimes of indirect rule – coercive, communal and exoticizing – to its population’ (p. 5).
Why does this differentiation occur? As Said (1979) noted, Western Europe needed the Orient as ‘contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’. It helped to define Europe (or the West), and to identify ‘us, Europeans’ against all those ‘non Europeans’. Etkind asks whether Russia has a romantic concept of the East. Some authors, like Thompson and Layton, argue that the Caucasus served as Russia’s own Orient, representing a semi-civilized space of freedom and adventure in the Russian imperial imagination. Similarly, Slezkine argues that ‘Siberia was to Russia what Russia was to the “West”: underdeveloped and therefore unspoiled, uncultured and therefore unadultered’ (Slezkine, 1994: 114).
Obviously, the geographic Orient was insufficient, so the Russian Orient has had to be reinvented in the heartlands of the empire. ‘On the level of folk culture – among millions of Russian peasants – life was “eastern”, “native”, “communal”, “oral”, and “mystical” ’ (p. 248), and subjected to anthropological curiosity. Otherizing and orientalizing their own peasantry was part of the self-isolation and self-preservation practices of nobility. As the author notes, Russian nobles often reinforced but redirected westerners’ view of Russian orientalism, mysticism and exoticism upon their peasantry, projecting onto them the ideas of ‘deep spirituality, free eroticism, love of suffering and collective property’ (p. 200). The discourse of otherizing served also in legitimizing the punitive practice towards the ‘Russian Sectarians who do not honor the Tsar’ (p. 200). In Russia, colonialism did not mean a split between us, Europeans vs them, Orientals, but a split between ‘us’, elites and them, peasants. The Russian was right at the heartlands of empire – it was its own peasantry.
Culturally and politically, this factor has heavily affected developments of Russian state and society. It has been said that a great colonial empire is at peace with its neighbours: ‘A great power at peace with its neighbors, set on a civilizing mission overseas, is one thing; a country that continuously looks over its shoulders at hostile subalterns is another’ (Thompson, 2000: 91). Great empire is also at peace with its own population, as cruelties related to the ‘original sin of the primitive accumulation of capital’, including ethnic cleansing, oppression, violence and mass murder, were committed not at home but in the colonies. Russia has had its exotic Other, its dangerous subaltern not outside but within the country, right at the heartlands of empire. As a result, Russia lived in ‘a neurotic fear, which is mixed with the desire, focused not only on the enemies beyond the borders but also on the space inside them’ (p. 5). It produced an empire that was violent, neurotic and insecure.
One of the arguments denying Russia its place within colonial and postcolonial studies is the argument of race. Russian colonialism was characterized both by a lack of geographic and also of racial distance. In this case the colonies were near, and the racial differences were absent or insignificant. As some commentators noted, the Russian language even lacked a term of its own for the concept of race, the word rasa is borrowed (Myer, 2002: 40). Etkind provides a new interpretation of the Big Shave, initiated as part of Petrine reforms, as an attempt to enforce social and cultural distanciation. In a society where racial differences were absent, shaving became a substitute for race (and the colonizing mission is rephrased, ironically, as shaved man’s burden). The purpose of the Big Shave was not to shave all Russian males, but to differentiate them and to organize myriads of ethnic, religious and professional groups into main estates: ‘instead of naturalizing social and linguistic differences in a racist way, the state codified them in a legal way, creating the system of estates that regulated the access of subjects to education, career and prosperity’ (p. 252).
How did Russian nobles themselves experience, perceive and legitimize the naturalization of differences? Etkind argues that ‘American slavery was justified by belief of racial inferiority. In Russia, nobody claimed that serfs are neither human nor Christians’ (p. 105). Russian colonialism lacked geographical and racial distance, but it lacked ideological distance as well. The suffering of the Russian nobles themselves originated not from their failure to mimic the French in an authentic manner, but rather from their undeniable resemblance to their own serfs. Resemblance was obvious, so despite all the mechanisms of self-segregation and self-preservation, Russian nobility suffered lack of distance, both physical and social, from their own subalterns. The serfs’ unavoidable presence and visibility was the painful trigger for the nobles, the inconvenient reminder of their own origin: serfs were ‘folk of our own blood’ (Griboedov, cited on p. 109). It is a reverse colonial double, signified not by a lack but by a surplus. Not absence, but the permanent presence of unwanted and undeniable evidence becomes a traumatizing factor for the Russian elites.
Etkind points out that the characteristic features of Russian colonization were negative cultural hegemony and a reverse imperial radiant. The colonies were more advanced than the mother country, and the officers of the empire were going native with an unexpected agility (p. 119), and the distribution of privileges across the empire from centre to periphery was reversed, unlike in the western empires where privileges were accumulated at the centre (p. 144). Both concepts are valuable for understanding the complexity of colonial developments, yet they are applicable mostly to the European part, or the western borderlands of the Russian empire. Here Russians found it difficult to maintain authority and often followed the cultural models of the subordinated nations. As Thompson notes, ‘The perception of Russian civilisational inferiority was so common in the nineteenth century that even such friends of Russia as Baron August von Haxthausen, who traveled in Russia at Tsar Nicholas I’s expense, stated that “the (Western) countries subdued by Russia possess for the most part a culture which is superior to that of their conqueror” ’ (Thompson, 2000: 18). He had in mind Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland and Georgia. However, the situation was different in the southern or eastern Russian colonies. Multiple sources provide records of state difficulties in forming an administrative and military corpus in the Far East; a large number of complaints or refusals of appointments; and travelogues reporting filthy conditions and poverty across Siberia (see Slezkine, 1994). In the Caucasus, Puhskin made his infamous complaint: ‘I know of no expression more nonsensical than words: Asian luxury … Asian poverty, Asian swinishness, etc., but luxury is, of course, an attribute of Europe. In Arzrum you cannot buy for any money what you can find in a general store in any district town of the Pskov province’ (cited in Thompson, 2000: 66). The concepts of negative cultural hegemony and reverse imperial gradient, despite limited geographical applicability, illuminate imperial failure to establish cultural superiority and explain, to certain extent, the turn of the colonizing forces inwards, into the heartlands of empire.
Internal Colonization is a fascinating volume and a significant contribution both to postcolonial and Slavonic studies. As colonialism is about distances, this volume is about distances too- the configuration of distances across Russian empire, the substitution of physical distances with social distances, the distances between Russia’s elites and its commons, etc. These configurations were not dismantled and continue to exist at the core of collective identity, predetermining contemporary Russian realities.