Russia: Colonial,anticolonial,postcolonial Empire?

Introduction

Large countries with intensive imperial or colonial past experience have a particular destiny in the modern world. Their historical past seems to have provided them with some special world-making capacities, which are much more difficult to obtain for the nations without similar experience. Arguably, this is exactly this colonial past that provided them with the capacity to be globally oriented and widely connected. Moreover, enduring dependencies and complex perceptions of the historical guilt or injustices make these nations active participants in the current discussions on a fairer world-ordering (for multiple complex influences of colonialism see, for example, Ferro, 1997).

There seems to be at least three main relevant aspects here. The first one is normative and related to the perception of the historical injustices and to the specific sensibility to the problems of a just world-ordering. It is this element, which makes the post-colonial/post-imperial nations sensitive to various aspects of neo-colonialism or new injustices of the world-order. The second aspect concerns the rich experience of inter-cultural relations these countries had in their historical past. For these nations multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon, but rather an important element of their historical experience. Finally, the third aspect is related to the experience of more or less effective management of the complex socio-cultural differences. Such nations have a living memory of all the problems, difficulties, injustices, but also of the effective approaches and ways of managing complex and culturally diverse societies. We believe that it is these three elements – normative, organizational and administrative ones – that make the historical experience of the large post-colonial or post-imperial nations so relevant for the current world-making. And, in any case, these elements seem to be important aspects of these nations’ ‘experience and interpretation’ of modernity (Wagner, 2008).

Apart from all other considerations, these characteristics of the post-colonial and post-imperial countries seem to be among the reasons why imperialism and colonialism are studied today with such unprecedented intensity. Both colonial/postcolonial and imperial studies have become an important branch of today’s scholarship. Imperial and colonial imaginaries are, thus, significant elements of today’s world-making, and as such must be taken into consideration.

BRICS nations share these qualities. They are large (with the exception of South Africa, which, however, is by no means less multicultural and diverse than other BRICS countries) post-colonial nations with intensive memories of historical injustices, interpretations of intercultural relations and experiences of managing culturally diverse societies. Being also fast-growing economies and regional leaders, they understandably have both ambitions and capacities for being active participants in the world-making. Arguably, it is this fact that partly explains why so different countries established an international grouping with a clear goal to get a fairer representation in the global world-making. As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put it, when commenting on the invitation of India, Brazil and South Africa as observers to the 2003 G8 summit in Evian, France: ‘We do not want to participate only to eat the dessert; we want to eat the main course, dessert and then coffee’ (Stuenkel, 2015: 6). IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) countries, thus, already in 2003 perceived the current world-order as not corresponding to their capacities and ambitions.

Russia, however, seems to be an odd bird in this cage. On the one hand, it is the only country with extensive Arctic regions in this group of Global South nations. Moreover, it is the only country of what has been formerly called the Second (as different from the Third) World. On the other hand, it is also the only country with truly extensive modern imperial experience. Arguably, in the Russian Empire, humankind had one of the largest and the most durable empires in the world. As Alexander Etkind (following Taagepera, 1988: 1) commented on this fact: ‘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 Muscovy/Russia/Soviet Union versus 45 million for the British Empire and 30 million for the Roman Empire’ (Etkind, 2011: 3–4). Now, what makes contemporary Russia then seek closer collaboration with other members of the BRICS club? What kind of imaginary enables this former imperial power not only to join the grouping of ex-colonies, but to become one of the most active drivers of the club?

The simpler, purely pragmatic answer is of course that the Russian leadership sought to change the image of the country via making it a member of the club of ‘emerging economies’ (that is a grouping of potential future powers), while, in reality, Russia is a post-imperial country, the glory of which is entirely in the past. From this perspective, ‘The institutionalization of the BRIC grouping was, above all, a diplomatic coup for Russia, which was able to become part of a group of economically dynamic countries whose strongest moment was thought to lie not in the past, but in the future. Russia was thus a country that most benefitted from the summit, as it – as a declining power – was able to partially obtain the status of an emerging power that can be expected to play a greater role in future global affairs’ (Stuenkel, 2015: 31). There is, however, a much more difficult and interesting question: How has post-imperial Russia managed to become a member of this post-colonial (and more importantly anti-colonial) grouping? Why is it able to at least effectively pretend to share the same values with the post-colonial countries of the Global South?

The difficulty of this question becomes obvious if we recall that here we are dealing with the nation, widely accused today of neo-imperialism (especially after the Ukrainian crisis and Crimea annexation). Since such accusations come not only from new nationalist regimes of former Soviet Republics, but also from internal Russian liberal circles, they point to an important imaginary, which partly defines the place of contemporary Russia in the current world order. How then is this country with ‘phantomic imperial pains’ (Efremov, 2018) able to associate itself with such radically anti-colonial countries as, for example, South Africa? This question is much deeper than the question revolving around current regimes or elites. This is a question on how a particular nation is interpreting its past and present experiences, and how it is seen by the others. In short, this is a question of imaginaries, which define the trajectory of the modernity of the country in question.

This article purports to briefly reconstruct this imaginary. We do not, however, think it is helpful to consider Russian history from the 15th or 16th century onward as a constant process of imperial and colonial expansion. On the contrary, both the longevity of the ‘Russian Empire’ and its complex contradictory imaginary are conceivable only in the context of an history full of gaps and significant ruptures. It is these differences and ruptures, which we will try to locate in the course of what can be otherwise seen as a long history of imperial domination over more or less distant colonies.

In order to do that systematically, we, however, should ask first what do we really mean when we talk of colonies or colonization? Is there any difference, say, between domination (which arguably is always accompanied by producing some cultural distance between the dominant and dominated) over a particular group and the colonization of it? Were, say Lithuania or Georgia, colonies of the Russian Soviet Empire in the same way as Siberia was for Muscovy of the 17th century or Alaska for the 18th century Petersburg Empire? Finally, what role does colonial imaginary play in the formation of the trajectories of Russian modernity? The last question, in its turn, is closely connected with the question of the role of colonialism in modernity as such.

Colonialism and modernity

Modern colonialism is part and parcel of modernity. Arguably, it is colonialism that represented the first historical form of both globalization and modernization. It is through its colonies that Europe tried to modernize (or civilize, according to the dominant terminology of this time) the world, and thus to make European modernity truly global (see for example, Ferro, 1997: 86). On the one hand, colonies provided Europe with an image of ‘the Other,’ thus contributing to the consolidation of the idea of Europe itself. It was colonialism, undoubtedly, that introduced a ‘new accumulation regime,’ and thus ‘drew Europe into a global economy’ (Stråth & Wagner, 2017: 92) contributing also to the unification of Europe (Stråth & Wagner, 2017: 48–52). On the other hand, colonial experience linked modernity with oppression, or rather, ‘modernity itself [. . .] inaugurated a history of oppression’ (Stråth & Wagner, 2017: 12). In short, we cannot hope to understand modernity without the history of colonization, which was at the same time a history of modernization, and a history of oppression and imperial domination. What, however, do we have in mind, when we talk of colonial experience?

First of all, one early modern meaning of colonization was ‘plantation’ – and not only of exotic plants such as sugar cane or Pará rubber trees, as we would probably expect, but of people. Such was, at least, Francis Bacon’s understanding in his essay 33 ‘On plantations’ (Bacon, 2001: 123–126). Colonies, then, presuppose transfer of people from their motherland to elsewhere, their ‘plantation’ on the other soil. This, in its turn also means more or less clear distinction between internal, national, and external, colonial. That is why it always was easier to talk about the colonies in the context of ocean empires, where internal and external were separated by masses of water than in relation to the continental empires, where, like in Russia, the boundaries between national and colonial have always been rather blurred. In any case, we talk of the colonies only when some trans-plantation of people takes place. That is why we talk about ancient Greek colonies or German colonies in the Volga region of 18th to 19th century Russia.

When, however, we refer to modern colonies as sources of wealth for the metropole or as the tools for ‘modernization’ or a primitive form of modern ‘globalization,’ we always think of them as maintaining tight connections with the country of origin or as being externally dominated by the mother country. The colonies were able to become the tools of modernization, thus, because ‘history of the colonies is surely the history of the ways in which the power, prestige and profits of some countries were enhanced [. . .] by external dependencies of migrant settlers’ (Finley, 1976: 174). That is why the USA of the 19th century can be referred to as a British ex-colony, but communities of German Mennonites in Russia of the 18th century have never really been true colonies of the German principalities. Finley thinks that Palestine Crusade Kingdoms of the Middle Ages also cannot be properly called colonies, because feudal personal connections and dependencies are not formal domination by an external state (Finley, 1976: 176). It is in this context of the tight connections with the metropole, that Bacon thinks that the new plantations must be taken care of before they can produce handsome profit: ‘Planting of countries is like planting of woods; for you must make account to lose almost twenty years’ profit, and expect your recompense in the end’ (Bacon, 2001: 123).

In addition to these three main elements – trans-plantation, external territory and formal (state) dependency – the very notion of soil seems to be of paramount importance. The main object of colonization seems to be exactly the soil, the land and not just a group of people. The external land, the territory, is where the trans-plantation happens. In the ideal case the land should be free, empty or belong to nobody. The discourse of nobody’s land or terra nullius is, thus, very important for the justification of colonization. This discourse equally applies to the vast Siberian territory in Russia or the lands of the present-day KwaZulu-Natal and Highveld after the turmoil of Mfecane and Difaqane, which led to the depopulation of these territories, subsequently occupied by white settlers (Nattrass, 2017: 57–58; Giliomee & Mbenga, 2007: 124–138). As Bacon put it, ‘I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others. For else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation’ (Bacon, 2001: 123).

Terra nullius, however, is rarely ‘pure’ in Bacon’s terminology, since it is often occupied by different indigenous peoples. Existence of indigenous population certainly complicates the issue and requires an elaborated theory of what is terra nullius if it is already occupied, and whether new-coming settlers can really wage just wars against local people who are defending the land upon which they have lived for millennia. It is here that the notions of civilization and barbarism enter the complex colonial discourse. Bacon already used the notion of superiority of civilization over barbarism as a reason for colonial domination, and the notion of modern moral education of the ‘savages’ as a justification for the land expropriation. ‘If you plant where savages are, do not only entertain them with trifles and gingles, but use them justly and graciously, with sufficient guard nevertheless; and do not win their favor by helping them to invade their enemies, but for their defence it is not amiss; and send oft of them over to the country that plants, that they may see a better condition than their own, and commend it when they return’ (Bacon, 2001: 125–126).

The discourse of colonization is, thus, connected with the discourse of civilization on the one hand, and education, on the other. How, then, is civilization conceptualized, and why does this conceptualization help to justify expropriation of the land from ‘uncivilized’ people or rather to understand this land as a proper terra nullius? First of all, there is a Christian theological background in early modern thinking about land ownership. As David Boucher noted:

The basic premise among jurists and philosophers in the early modern period regarding property rights was that God gave the whole world in common to mankind, and those portions that remained unoccupied or uncultivated, which did not necessarily mean upon which no people resided, were available for legitimate occupation. (Boucher, 2010: 71)

Moreover, since God gave the land to humankind to make the most of it through its cultivation by labor, only those, who cultivate the land (and not simply occupy it), can claim the property right. Property comes with labor and not with occupation. Thus, uncultivated land is conceptualized as terra nullius even if it is occupied by ‘savage’ hunters and gatherers. ‘Vitoria, Ayala, Suarez, Gentile, Locke, Wolff and Vattel, for example, contend that people have an obligation to cultivate the land, and if they do not they have no right to prevent those who would’ (Boucher, 2010: 71).

‘Savages’ are, thus, those who do not cultivate the land, while ‘civilization’ comes with husbandry. The right to husbandry, in its turn, is one of the most fundamental natural rights connected with the right for self-preservation. John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government provides one of the clearest expositions of this logic. The whole Chapter V of the Second Treatise has probably been written by Locke with the case of American colonies in mind (Waldron, 2002: 165). For Locke the right for husbandry is one of the fundamental natural rights. ‘God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniences of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsom and Contentious’ (Locke, 1988: 291). It is cultivation, according to Locke, which is the beginning of property. Where, as in America, the ‘savages’ live almost in the state of nature, uncultivated (even if occupied) land belongs to nobody, and is effectively terra nullius. Thus, ‘The American Indians, and any peoples who fail to cultivate the land to its full productive capacity, failed to exhibit the industriousness and rationality required of them by God and had no good reasons for objecting to those who are more capable of fulfilling God’s will.’ (Boucher, 2010: 79) In short, civilization is a capacity to effectively use the land, and as such it is connected with industriousness and rationality.

Another element of civilization is contract-based political community. The:

Labour, in the Beginning, gave a Right of Property, where-ever any one was pleased to imploy it, upon what was common, which remained, a long while, the far greater part, and is yet more than Mankind makes use of. [. . .] afterwards, in some parts of the World, (where the Increase of People and Stock, with the Use of Money) had made Land scarce, and so of some Value, the several Communities settled the Bounds of their distinct Territories, and by Laws within themselves, regulated the Properties of the private Men of their Society, and so, by Compact and Agreement, settled the Property which Labour and Industry began. (Locke, 1988: 299)

This means that while in the Americas the land is technically still in the common possession of mankind (terra nullius or vacuum domicilium: see Arneil, 1996: 109) and would rightly belong to those who would be able to use it in the most effective way, in ‘civilized’ societies the relations of property are regulated by the positive laws of the political society. Locke, thus, first:

[D]efines political society in such a way that Amerindian government does not qualify as a legitimate form of political society. Rather it is construed as a historically less developed form of European political organization located in the later stages of the ‘state of nature’ [. . .] Second, Locke defines the property in such a way that Amerindian customary land use is not a legitimate type of property. (Tully, 1993: 139)

Thus, colonialism, originally at least, is more about the land and the property, than about the ‘colonized’ people. Legitimation of the expropriations, however, was a starting point for the civilization discourse, which drew sharp boundaries between modern European nations and the ‘savage’ indigenous populations of the colonies. Colonization, then, came also with a special ‘white man’s burden’: to serve, in Kipling’s words, ‘your new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child’ (Kipling, 1899). We have seen that already Bacon recommended to send the ‘savages’ to ‘the country that plants’ so that they would see for themselves the advantages of the European ways of life and would commend them after returning home. The ‘white man’s burden’ then is conceptualized as the education for modernization. This educational dimension of colonial imperialism seems to be a unique feature of modernity. If Rome, according to Vergil, must only govern the peoples (Vergilius, n.d.: Lib. VI, 851–853), modern Europe had to educate them.

John Stuart Mill, for example, has famously made moral education in colonies an important element of his concept of liberty. For him:

[D]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. (Mill, 1991: 31)

‘Barbarians,’ ‘savages,’ are ‘half children,’ and since nobody grants to children (who can harm themselves and others) the full liberty of adult people, it cannot be granted to the ‘barbarians’ either. If, in thinking of the ‘savages,’ Locke focused upon rational mastery of the world (effective use of the land), Mill pays attention to the individual autonomy (capacity to be improved by free discussion). Both elements define ‘civilization’ in contrast to ‘barbarism.’ Interestingly, taken together, they consist in what Cornelius Castoriadis called ‘double imaginary signification of modernity,’ entangled imaginaries of rational mastery and autonomy (Castoradis, 1997: 37–38, Arnason, 1989: 327). ‘Civilization,’ then, is essentially opposed to ‘barbarism’ as ‘modernity’ to a ‘pre-modern’ state of affairs, and ‘white man’s burden’ is defined then as a responsibility to modernize the globe. Although Mill himself referred to the subjects of Charlemagne as ‘the barbarians’ of these passages (Mill, 1991: 31), one cannot help thinking that for him, at some point a high officer of the East India Company, this notion covered also the population of the Indian sub-continent.

Another interesting feature of Mill’s moral education for modernity is its psychological dimension. Full autonomy can only be given to those who are able to master it rationally, to control autonomy for the sake of the progress of humanity. A ‘savage’ cannot be improved by autonomy, because he cannot control his freedom and, being half-child, can harm himself. This idea of the rational mastery of one’s own freedom is expressed in a complex Victorian idea of character.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own – are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture – is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character. (Mill, 1991: 76)

Of course, we do not aim at providing a comprehensive review of the literature on colonialism and imperialism here. For one thing, it is absolutely impossible, for another, any similar undertaking is beyond the scope of this article. What should be added to the picture, however, is the relation between the notions of imperialism and colonialism. Of course, there is an extensive literature on imperialism, much of which is of Marxist-Leninist persuasion. It makes sense, however, to refer, first, to the book which influenced Lenin’s concept of imperialism, namely John Atkinson Hobbson’s Imperialism: A Study (Hobbson, 1902).

For Hobbson colonialism is not only very different from imperialism, but, in its original spirit, is contradictory to imperial domination. Genuine colonialism is, for Hobbson, ‘migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands, the emigrants carrying with them full rights of citizenship in the mother country, or else establishing local self-government with her institutions and under her final control, may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality’ (Hobbson, 1902: 6). Imperialism, nonetheless, is a domination over foreign territories, which does not always imply migration of people. Some colonies, according to Hobbson, choose self-governance in the spirit of genuine colonialism (South Africa, for example), while others (such as India) are exploited in the spirit of imperialism. Colonial imperialism, thus, for Hobbson, is a perversion of colonialism, when colonies are not considered anymore as extensions of nationality but are imperialistically exploited. Thus, for him, the French and German territories in Africa and Asia are not real colonies, since they ‘were in no real sense plantations of French and German national life beyond the seas; nowhere, not even in Algeria, did they represent true European civilization; their political and economic structure of society is wholly alien from that of the mother country’ (Hobbson, 1902: 7). Colonialism, thus, is always somewhere in between nationalism, on the one hand, and imperialism, on the other. That is why the dialectic of internal and external is so important for an understanding of the colonial.

Two main things usually help in distinguishing internal and external, national and colonial. We have already mentioned masses of water, which endowed ocean empires with clear boundaries between national and colonial territory. But the most powerful discourse, which rendered population of those territories different was, of course, the discourse of the race (or, in some cases, of ethnos). Existence of obvious physical differences made race an effective instrument for separating external and internal. Races and oceans, thus, played similar roles in modern colonialism (there is a rich literature on these issues. See for example, Betts, 1982, demonstrating how the French Empire was constantly re-producing differences between white colon and black or yellow indigènes). Racism, thus, helped to substitute what Hobbson called ‘colonial spirit’ with purely imperialistic exploitation, and to abandon the very thought of the possibility of considering ‘colonial’ as an extension of the ‘national.’

Lenin, by the way, already had an exclusively imperialistic version of modern colonialism, which for him marked the highest and the last stage of capitalism. His logic famously started with the claim of the monopolistic character of contemporary capitalism, and continued with the description of the financial oligarchy and of the export of capital as the main instruments of the imperialistic colonial exploitation of ‘backward’ countries. Lenin concluded with the discussion of imperialism as the exploitation of some nations by others and demonstrated antagonism between imperialistic nations, fighting each other in the struggle for the new colonies (see Lenin, 1964). Lenin’s concept of imperialism became a basis for much of Marxist literature, until very recently (for a description of Marxist approaches to the topic, see Kiernan, 1974; for contemporary Leninist theory see Tujan, 2017).

Marxist or Leninist concepts of imperialism and colonialism continue playing an important part in how these phenomena are seen today. They all are based, however, on a certain interpretation of capitalist economic forces and see the development of imperialistic colonialism, first of all, as an expression of the material interests of large monopolies. Now, whatever value these concepts might have for an understanding of the objective driving forces behind modern imperialism, for our purposes this literature is of rather limited interest. The primary object of this article is an analysis of colonialism and imperialism as social imaginary, and not as an objective economic process. Marxist concepts, however, will surely interest us to the extent they influenced this kind of social imaginary in Russia.

Thus, the imaginary of modern colonialism represents a complex, but well-defined set of tightly connected ideas. It always refers to the transfer of the ‘civilized’ people to the ‘barbaric’ external places, accompanied both by the expropriation of the uncultivated lands, and by complex educational projects aimed at the development of rational mastery among the pre-modern people, who will be given full autonomy in the future. The ‘savages’ at the same time are very often defined in racial terms, which (together with the masses of ocean water) provides another instrument for the physical separation of the metropole and colony. As such the project of colonization was one both of globalization and modernization, and at the same time of separation and localization. Colonialism, then, in modern times became an integral part of the idea of modernity as such. It should not surprise us, then, that even today, in the era of comprehensive decolonization, various development and modernization projects, undertaken by the Global North countries in the Global South, often have the same, old odor of (neo)-colonialism.

Russia as a colonial empire

‘The history of Russia is a history of the country, which is colonizing itself. The area of colonization here has been expanding together with its state territory. Sometimes slowing and sometimes rising, this movement is still going on,’ by these famous words a great Russian historian, Vasily Klyuchevsky, characterized what he thought to be the main idea of what makes Russian history (Klyuchevsky, 1908: 24). In this he followed the thought of his teacher, according to whom ‘the main phenomenon of Russian history was that the state, when it expanded its dominions, occupied vast empty spaces and populated them; the area of the state was expanding for the most part via colonization; the dominating people – the Slavic one – sent their settlements further and further in the depth of the Orient. All European tribes are destined by the history to send the settlements to the other parts of the world to disseminate Christianity and civility. The Western European tribes were to do it via the sea, while the Eastern tribe – the Slavic one – was destined to do it via dry land’ (Soloviev, 1898: 12).

In this description we do see all major elements of colonialism: the transfer of people; the concept of ‘empty land,’ of terra nullius; the idea of the continuing dependence of the new settlements upon the sending country; the discourse of civilization and of modernization; definitions in tribal if not openly racial terms etc. The main difference is that the Western Europeans colonize lands overseas, while Russia expands its influence through dry land. It is not only a matter of distance, of course. It has been often argued that Russian lands in the Far East were much farther from the metropole than any British overseas colonies from London: simply because sea travel was much faster at this time than travel through dry land. ‘Technically and psychologically, India was closer to London than many areas of the Russian Empire were to St. Petersburg [. . .] The oceans connected, while land divided’ (Etkind, 2011: 5).

The difference is, as we have already seen, the lack of distinct clear boundaries, which sometimes makes it extremely difficult to draw the line between internal and external, national and colonial. Could Siberia, for example, be described as a colony? And, even more importantly, where does it really end? One of the 19th century writers on Siberia, Nikolai Yadrintsev (1842–1894), for example, seemed to think of it as including large areas of Central Asia, such as Semirechye (Zhetysu) in Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz steppes and Fergana valley (Yadrintsev, 1882: 142). In Russian official imperial discourse, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ were constantly redefined. There were (and in reality, still are) at least several types of externalities: something which can be described as ‘internalized external,’ as ‘near external,’ and as ‘far external.’ This understanding had its parallels in the national organization of the Soviet Union with its ethnically defined ‘Autonomous Republics’ or ‘Autonomous Regions’ (internalized external) and its fifteen Union Republics (near external), inherited today in the current understanding of the ‘near abroad’ (former Soviet Republics) and national ‘Autonomous Republics’ inside the Russian Federation.

During active phases of colonization, the frontier has been moving, thus, constantly transforming external into ‘near external’ first and, then, into ‘internalized external.’ With the huge territorial coverage of the colonization, this movement could not, of course, be linear: it left uncolonized vast areas for the colonizers to return to in the future. Or, as Yadrintsev described the colonization of Siberia: ‘In its essence, the distribution (of the population) can be compared with a column, marching to the East, solid in the beginning, then narrowing, and in the end completely disappearing in the desert, as a river disappears in the sandy steppe. The enemy is pictured by the aliens (inorodtsy) forced back here and there. This army is engaged into a desperate struggle with nature, it builds the bridges, cuts the forests, and its scouts, often going too far forward, do not have time to glance back until these forests are rising again [. . .] and the vanguard column is left enclosed by them lonely in the midst of the desert, separated from the rest of the population’ (Yadrinstev, 1882: 9)

These blurred boundaries between external and internal make it difficult to define Russia of the 16th to 19th centuries as a colonial empire which, in fact, has certain important consequences for the social imaginaries. First, in the process of colonization in Russia, we always see constant attempts to internalize the external, to transform the colonial into the national. This internalization could take different forms: of russification of the indigenous population, of the introduction of national legislation in semi-external territories, of the creation of infrastructure, which would tightly connect new territories with central Russia and so on.

The commentators describe two main ways of colonization of the large Siberian territories: an official state-sponsored one and a popular colonization by those who sought better destinies in the new territories (Yadrinstev, 1882: 154–156; Shchapov, 1908: 645). While the state builds roads and establishes fortresses, thus drawing a ‘plan for colonization,’ various adventurers, pioneers and runaways do the real work of colonization of the ‘empty’ territories. As such ‘Siberia is [. . .] a product of the autonomous popular aspiration and creativity.’ (Yadrinstev, 1882: 127, 154) The Siberian territories were attractive for the peasant runaways from European Russia both because of the availability of the land, and because of the absence of serfdom in the new territories. And after the first ‘nomadic’ stages of the colonization, inspired by the fur trade (Etkind, 2011: 72–90), there came a period of urban development, industry and trade (Shchapov, 1908: 646–647). Interestingly, in 1882, Nikolai Yadrintsev advised to follow the model of the European colonial empires in Siberia. He comments on two trends of ‘official colonization’: one, focused on the controlling of the popular movements, and another, aimed at helping autonomous popular actions. It is the last method, according to him, which is ‘nowadays employed by European colonization’ (Yadrinstev, 1882: 156).

In Siberian colonial imagination, it seems, one can find all the elements of traditional colonial discourse. We have already seen that it was described as resettlement on the vast ‘empty’ spaces. It was indeed the colonization of the land which, according to the dominant view, has been described as vacuum domicilium, as wild and belonging to nobody. As for the numerous indigenous populations of the Asian territories, even the most benevolent authors of the 19th century referred to them as ‘lower races’ (Shchapov, 1906: 327; Yadrintsev, 1891: 189; Yadrintsev, 1882: 123).

A brilliant historian of Siberia, Afanasy Shchapov (1831–1876) wrote in 1864: ‘Let us be humane and scientifically attentive to our lower brothers, the alien tribes. They are also waiting for facilitation of their struggle with the climate, hunger, with the violence of the higher tribe, waiting for the enlightenment [. . .] and for their conflation with the higher, more developed Slavic Russian tribe’ (Shchapov, 1906: 366). Describing the colonial vocation of Russia, Shchapov compares it with Britain. Anglo-Saxon and Russian peoples are the two European tribes who have the historical task of colonial expansion. Britain is colonizing sea and islands, while Russia has the task of continental colonization in Eurasia (Shchapov, 1906: 366). Shchapov’s follower, Nikolai Yandintsev, while he shows a ‘heartful and brotherly approach to the stepchildren of European culture, who have full rights to existence, progress and culture’ (Lemke, 1904: v), and bitterly complains on the extermination of the Siberian indigenous peoples with arms, illnesses and shameless exploitation, he is also worrying about the erosion of the Russian population in Siberia, both through the loss of their culture and via intermarriages with the indigenous population. Among other things, he is concerned with the diminished productivity of the metis women who, at most, are able to give birth to only (sic!) 7 to 8 children (Yadrintsev, 1882: 26–27).

Racial discourse, thus, helped to draw the line between colony and metropole in the absence of vast masses of ocean water between them. One of the peculiar features of Russian expansion to the East, however, was that this kind of racial terminology has not really been applied systematically. For a long time, the prevailing view was that this expansion involved not so much colonial gains in barbaric lands and over racially different people, but rather expansion of the Russian nationality to the far corners of Eurasia. This inconsistency can be described in terms of the contradictions between genuinely colonial and imperial discourses, and is best demonstrated by the complex history of the concepts of ‘savages’ (dikari), ‘indigenous peoples’ (tuzemtsy) or ‘aliens’ (inorodtsy) in the official discourse of the Russian Empire.

Nineteenth century liberal authors always find a solution for the ‘aliens’ question’ in the enlightenment of both the Russian population of Siberia, who are supposed to be the bearers of the ‘higher culture,’ and of ‘the aliens,’ who very often are described by the language of Daniel Defoe and Rudyard Kipling. Thus, commenting on economic exploitation of the ‘aliens’ by Russian traders, Yadrintsev said:

The tastes and requirements of the savage are formed by peculiar laws. He often is attracted by not utilitarian things [. . .] but by those things, encouraging his passions and childish infatuations. Very often the savage is charmed by shining, but cheap trifles [. . .] Then he seeks a momentary satisfaction of the sensations and passions; every narcosis such as tobacco, wine or opium is tempting to him and develops in him a passionate attraction and a distractive habit. Trade in this case is a bad guide for life. (Yadrinstev, 1882: 101)

The solution to all problems lies in education, enlightenment and a better life. Only in this case, according to Yadrintsev, the ‘aliens’ would become allies of the great Russian culture in civilizing Asia. ‘If Siberia is to play any role in this worldwide civilizing influence [of European culture], the Siberian aliens, having acquired European enlightenment with the help of Russian nationality, can be really visible mediators of this civilization and render great services to the progress of humankind’ (Yadrinstev, 1882: 125).

The idea of a civilizing mission of Russia in Asia has been a commonplace in European discourse. Even those authors, who as Engels, were skeptical about a ‘Russian world,’ have semi-reluctantly recognized this mission. Thus, Engels wrote in 1851 to Marx: ‘Russia, on the other hand, is truly progressive by comparison with the East. Russian rule, for all its infamy, all its Slavic filth, is civilizing for the Black and Caspian Seas and Central Asia, for the Bashkirs and Tatars’ (Engels, 2010: 363). Surprisingly this arrogant phrase is closely echoed by the nationalistic Fyodor Dostoyevsky: ‘In Europe we were dependents and slaves; we will come to Asia as the masters. In Europe we were Tatars; in Asia we are Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will attract our spirit [. . .] Just build two railroads [. . .] one to Siberia, another to Central Asia’ (Dostoyevsky, 1984b: 36–37). Some other conservative authors, however, especially after the Crimea War of 1855, considered it an offence for Russia to limit its ambition to treating ‘five or six million vagabonds of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, possibly together with two or three million Mongolian nomads, to European civilization’ (Danilevskiy, 2016: 98).

Apart from Siberia and Central Asia, the Caucasus was another main focus of Russian imperial imagination and activity. Mikhail Lermontov’s (1814–1841) ‘Caucasian’ novels and poems are good examples of what today the literary critics would probably call ‘colonial orientalist literature.’ His Maxim Maximych from A Hero of Our Time is an example of an old colonial soldier, who knows and likes the Orient (Lermontov, 1951). And in a fascinating poem, ‘Dispute,’ Lermontov described a discussion between two great Caucasian mountains, Elbrus and Kazbek. While the first one warns his brother against humans, the second describes a sleepy Orient, which a long time ago lost its strength:

See, in shadow the Grusine Gloats in lustful greed, On his many coloured raiment Glints the winey bead! Drugged with fumes of his nargileh, Dreams the Mussulman – By the fountains on his divan Slumbers Teheran.

Looking back to the North, however, Kazbek has been stunned by the view of the mighty Russian army, which is heading to the Caucasus:

From the Don unto the Ural What a human sea! Regiments that wave and glitter Past all counting be! Feathers white like sedge of ocean, Waving in a gust-Many coloured Uhlans storming Through the blowing dust. The imperial battalions Densely packed proceed, Trumpets flaring, banners flying In the victor’s lead.

The purpose of this conquering seems, however, to be described as mastering nature. Thus, Elbrus warns Kazbek on the annoying human activity:

Smoking huts he will be building On thy mountain side, Loudly through thy clefts resounding Ring his hatchet wide! The swift swinging iron shovel Breast of stone will part, Of thy bronze and stone will rob thee – Pierce thee to the heart.

(Lermontov, 1841)

The colonial subjects, at times benevolent and at times wild savages, have been called in Russian official documents of 1822–1917 inorodtsy, that is aliens or, literally, alien-born (similar to the French allogène). Legally, the term meant mostly nomadic peoples, who were not subject to the general laws of the Empire, kept their traditional leadership and enjoyed some privileges, such as exemption from military service (Slocum, 1998: 173). Unofficially the term had clear pejorative meaning and referred mostly to the ‘backward’ non-Russian population in need of the civilizing influence of colonization. The French version of Yadrintsev’s book title on Siberian inorodtsy translates the term as Indigènes de la Sibérie. Gradually, however, the term has been widened to include Jews (from 1835), then the settled population of Central Asia (from 1860–1870s), and, finally all non-Russians, excluding Little Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belarusians) (Slocum, 1998; Sunderland, 2010: 138). One can easily notice that, in the beginning, the term had much more intense racial meaning than later. By the beginning of the 20th century, it had been used very often in a pejorative, but racially neutral, manner. This history of the term inorodtsy again demonstrates tensions between imperial and colonial, or racial and national discourses.

In any case, the civilizing mission of the Russian Empire in its Asian territories has been widely recognized and discussed both in Russian society and elsewhere in Europe. Thus, the colonial activity of the Russian Empire in the 19th century contains the elements of a colonial imaginary described earlier. Namely, its colonies involved migration of the population (‘plantation’) to external lands, cultivation of this land (or other use of the territory), dependence of the colonial lands on the metropole, as well as civilization and education of the indigenous populations, described as ‘lower,’ ‘savage,’ ‘childish,’ etc. The blurred and highly unstable nature of the continental boundaries, however, made the frontier move, in an attempt to constantly internalize the external possessions. Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, Russian Siberia with all its vast lands became widely considered as an integral part of the main Russian territory.

Another important feature was the reluctance of the central authorities to use colonial language in defining its dealings with the territories. In official language the very word ‘colony’ was used almost exclusively to designate settlements of foreigners (as colonies of Volga Germans) or outposts of traders, soldiers, etc. (Sunderland, 2010: 137). In the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century, all peoples of the Empire were treated as the Emperor’s subjects without dividing them clearly between Russian and ‘colonial’ ones. As a matter of fact, even Catherine II, for whom Siberia was ‘new Peru’ and ‘Russia’s India’ (Sunderland, 2010: 138), treated the diversity of the peoples in the Empire as an important good. ‘We in Russia have such peoples [boasted the Empress in her letter to Baron Friedrich von Grimm] whom, as any enemy appears, could be mobilized at once, and they would go with arms and transport against anybody’ (Catherine II, 1878: 226).

In the 19th century, Russian officials seemed to have found a way of describing Russian possessions of different types. ‘Finland, the Baltic Provinces, parts of Poland, Little Russia, and Bessarabia were ethnically or socially distinct peripheries or borderlands (okrainy), like those found on the edges of other European states. [. . .] By contrast, the Empire’s colonies – that is, the territories, that were most likely to receive this label from Russian observers – were located in ‘Asiatic Russia’: Siberia, the Kazakh Steppe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (Turkestan)’ (Sunderland, 2010: 139).

This is an important observation. One obvious distinction between ‘colonial’ Asiatic Russia and western peripheries is a racial one. We have already noticed that the ‘Asian tribes’ of Siberia, for example, were easily classified as ‘lower races,’ which characterization, of course, could not be used in the case of the European Finnish, Baltic or Slavic populations. The racial language, however, has not been systematically attached to them: the term ‘Asiatic’ was often used in a more neutralizing, purely geographical manner. That is why the official language referred to these two parts of the Empire as ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ Russia and not as colony and metropole (Khodorkovsky, 2012: 11). That is why when, by the end of the 1850s, one of the Petersburg scientific societies discussed the issues of colonies, and Baron Peter Meyendorff argued against strengthening Siberia because of the danger of colonial separatism, Great Prince Konstantin pacified the dispute with the claim that ‘Siberia is not a colony, but an extension of the state territory’ (Potanin, 1907: 16).

This discussion was even more relevant for Russian Central Asia. In 1916, a rebellion took place in Turkestan because of the decision of the imperial government to mobilize the Central Asian male population for trench work at the battlefront. After brutal suppression of the riot, a State Duma commission, led by the future head of the Provisional Government, socialist Alexander Kerensky, thoroughly investigated the causes and consequences of the rebellion. In his Duma speech on December 13, 1916, less than three months before Nicholas II’s abdication, Kerensky insisted that ‘Turkestan and the Kyrgyz steppe regions are no Tula or Tambov provinces. We need to look at them as the English or the French look at their colonies. This is a huge world with original economy, politics and everyday life’ (Kerensky, 1916).

What did Kerensky really mean, when he advised a colonial perspective to the imperial Russian authorities? The context clearly suggests better knowledge of the local circumstances and management of the Central Asian territories in accordance with these specific local conditions. In short, he meant effective governance on the basis of deep professional knowledge. In other words, this is what Sunderland called ‘colonial technocratic package’: ‘Colonial experts trained in the science of effective colonial management’ and ‘cultural and economic development’ of the colonial territories (Sunderland, 2010: 125). Modern colonization has always been connected with the idea of the development via a triptych of connected considerations: economic, philanthropic and political ones (Rist, 2008: 49–52).

Interestingly, in Russia even philanthropic considerations were not so much about developing autonomy of ‘lower races’ (especially those living in the North), but rather about helping them in their desperate struggle with nature. In short, Russian colonization was, for the most part, more about mastering the natural world than about the exercise of human (individual or collective) autonomy. It would be very difficult to find in Russian colonization literature any considerations similar to Mill’s understanding of moral education of children and barbarians. This focus on mastering also meant an aspiration for uniformity and a reluctance to treat the colonies differently from the rest of Russia (partly, of course, because of the fear of the inevitable separatism).

Development for late imperial Russia meant resettlement of Russian peasant populations on the lands of colonial acquisition. The government’s resettlement administration in the beginning of the 20th century became the closest analog to a colonial ministry in the Russian Empire. In his speech at the State Duma on March 16, 1910 the Russian Minister of agriculture, Alexander Krivoshein, highlighted the necessity of a strategic plan for the colonization of Asiatic Russia. ‘Colonization’ here meant development and resettlement. It is this understanding of colonization that we can find in the literature of the beginning of the 20th century. For example, in 1907–1917 some ‘activists of the resettlement’ (deyateli pereselencheskogo dela) published 20 edited volumes under the telling name of Voprosy Colonizatsii (‘colonization issues’). The last issue contains another State Duma speech, which commented on the success of the development in Siberia in this way: ‘Siberia, rich by natural resources, but poor in terms of population, began to revive with the working force flow as a result of recent resettlement. This fact provides us with a clear example of the effectiveness of the investments in the production needs’ (Simonov, 1917: 17). Resettlement on the vast ‘empty’ lands (terra nullius) seems to be the main colonial policy of imperial Russia in the beginning of the 20th century.

At this time Russia had still been developing from a composite dynastic state into a modern colonial empire, but the tsarist state was undone by the revolution of 1917 (Sunderland, 2010: 124). Interestingly, however, it is exactly the colonial ambitions of Russia in the Far East which were one of the causes of the first Russian Revolution of 1905. The growing appetite of Nicholas II in the Far East is nicely described by the Prime Minister of Russia at this time, Sergey Witte: ‘Naturally there has often been in his soul a thought about further expansion of the great Russian Empire in the direction of the Far East, about submission of the Chinese Emperor (bogdykhan) as the Bukhara emir has already been subjected, and even about attaching to the Russian Emperor’s title some further titles such as Bogdykhan of China, Mikado of Japan, etc.’ (Witte, 1960b: 440) These ambitions were also skillfully supported by, for example, the German Kaiser (Witte, 1960a: 43) whose ship, according to Witte, after one of their meetings signaled to the ship of Nicholas II: ‘The Admiral of the Atlantic Ocean is greeting the Admiral of the Pacific Ocean’ (Witte, 1960b: 225). These ambitions resulted in the Russo-Japanese war, which sent anti-colonial waves across the world in such a way that some experts christened it ‘World War Zero’ (Akira, 2007: 3). The humiliating defeat of a European power by an Asiatic country is sometimes treated as the beginning of the rise of the Third World and as the start of the transition from the imperial epoch to the age of nationalism. Nevertheless, it is this defeat which caused major unrest in Russia and resulted in the first Russian Revolution, which caused the tsar to establish the Parliament (Duma) and to grant basic liberties in his Manifesto of October 17, 1905.

Arguably, one of the important results of several centuries of Russian colonial expansion was the formation of a certain imperial personality, a personality of the frontier, flexible and open to the influences from other cultures. One of the most powerful descriptions of this personality was given by Dostoyevsky in his famous speech after the opening of Pushkin’s monument in Moscow on June 8, 1880. For him, ‘the Russian soul [. . .] is perhaps most capable to contain the idea of the unity of all mankind, of brotherly love, of the sober view, which would forgive all enemies, would discern and excuse the different, would sublate the contradictions’ (Dostoyevsky, 1984a: 131). ‘To become a true Russian, to become fully Russian means perhaps only to become a brother of all people, to become all-human (vsechelovekom), if you want’ (Dostoyevsky, 1984a: 147).

Dostoyevsky, of course, was not the first to assert this ‘all-human’ nature of the Russian people. Aleksey Khomyakov, comparing the European and Russian colonies, accused Europe of inhuman exploitation. At the same time, he thinks that ‘the Russian looks at all peoples inside of the infinite borders of the Northern Kingdom as at his brothers, and Siberians in their evening meetings even use the languages of their nomadic neighbors, Yakuts and Buryats. The daring Cossack of Caucasus takes his wife from a Chechen aul, the peasant marries a Tatar or Mordva woman, and Russia calls its glory and joy the great-grandson of the negro Gannibal, while American freedom-loving preachers of equality would reject him the rights of the citizen’ (Khomyakov, 1871: 107). Importantly, this vision of the Russian Empire as uniting all tribes in one single ‘all-human’ Russian super-nation had obviously anti-racist orientation (the example of Pushkin with his Ethiopian or Cameroonian ancestry has been mentioned with this clear purpose in mind) and plainly contradicted the idea of seeing in indigenous ‘savages’ racially different people in need of a separate ‘colonial’ imperial administration.

This idea of Russia as uniting East and West, or as pacifying Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy, as solving all social antagonisms etc., became really widespread in Russian educated society by the end of the 19th century. One of the most influential philosophical movements of this time, the so-called ‘Philosophy of All-Unity,’ has undoubtedly been influenced by this imaginary. In any case, the colonial experience and cultural encounters made it much easier for Russian society to embrace the multiculturalism of the Soviet regime of the 20th century.

At the same time, in its relations to the colonial territories, to ‘the aliens’ and to the frontier, the politics of the Russian Empire was always focused on unification, mastering, and control. ‘For most educated Russians inside and outside government, the ideal of an increasingly uniform (though not culturally homogenous), Russian-centered empire – ‘a Russian state [. . .] united and indivisible,’ ‘a Greater Russia’ (Velikaya Rossia) – remained the basic goal’ (Sunderland, 2010: 150). Unification and russification through resettlement and implantation of Russian culture were both the methods and goals of this control. As almost invariably in its history, Russia, with its huge spaces, difficult climate and diverse population, favored mastering, security and control over autonomy, freedom and rights. From the very beginning, Russian modernity has been shaped as a modernity of control. Even more than towards the aliens, however, the control was directed towards Russia’s ‘natural subjects’ (prirodniye poddanniy), ethnically Russian peasants or ‘the people’ (narod).

Thus, to conclude this section, let us recapitulate. Our material seems to have clearly demonstrated that colonization in Russia was essentially ambivalent. On the one hand, there is a trend of interpreting all peripheries in terms of the expansion of a unifying state power and of considering Russia as an ‘all-human’ empire. On the other hand, there is a discourse, trying to establish racial distance between the metropole and colonies and arguing that the colonies should be managed as separate cultural worlds. Although the first trend always dominated official discourse, the first sixteen years of the 20th century seem to demonstrate the growing strength of the second trend. It would surely have brought the Russian Empire to the ways of all major European colonial empires, if the Russian Revolution had not interrupted this process in 1917.

Internal colonization thesis

The main problem of Russian society of the 19th century, however, has not been perceived as connected with managing the new territories. The attention of public intellectuals, writers, philosophers, social activists etc., was focused upon the relation between modernized (or, in Russian circumstances, westernized) nobility or (starting from 1860s) intelligentsia, and traditional, Orthodox, backward ‘people’ (narod). Interestingly, colonized territories never had serfdom and, in many respects, were better off than central provinces. Alexander Etkind calls it ‘a reversed imperial gradient,’ and notices that ‘emancipation began with reforms on the periphery of the Empire and from there moved to the heartland. After Emancipation, Russians were still subjected to heavier economic exploitation than non-Russians’ (Etkind, 2011: 252).

The gap between the educated elite and ‘the people’ at one point was really huge. In the beginning of the 19th century, the nobility’s mother language was French so that the educated people had difficulties in expressing themselves in the Russian language. Leo Tolstoy, for example, describes the Russian language of Prince Hippolyte in War and Peace as similar to the language which ‘a Frenchman would speak after spending about a year in Russia’ (Tolstoy, 2010: 23). The gap was, thus, not only economic or educational: it was cultural and civilizational, so that Russian peasants for the educated class sometimes were more mysterious than indigenous tribes of the Far North. Such, at least, were Alexander Griboyedov’s impressions of his encounter with peasants in Pargolovo, a suburban area to the north of Saint Petersburg (see Etkind, 2011: 109).

By the middle of the century the gap was increasingly understood in colonial terms where ‘the people,’ peasants, took the place of the colonized people, while the educated classes, nobility or intelligentsia, imagined themselves, often with guilt, as colonizers. Given the fact of the ‘reversed imperial gradient,’ it was the Russian people that were interpreted as colonial subjects in need of radical decolonization. The leader of the Slavophils, Aleksey Khomyakov, in his article of 1845 commented on the foreign, colonizing character of the European Enlightenment in Russia. He called the borrowed science ‘colonial’ (Khomyakov, 1900: 24) and condemned the discord it caused with the real life that created Great Russia long ‘before foreign science came to gild its tops’ (Khomyakov, 1900: 22). The result of this discord is the situation, where ‘there was knowledge in the upper classes, but this knowledge was absolutely remote from life; there was life in the lower classes, but this life never rose to consciousness’ (Khomyakov, 1900: 22).

Later, in 1869, the father of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin called young people to ‘leave this world, doomed to perish, the universities, academies and schools [. . .] in which they tried to separate you from the people [. . .] Go to the people! There it is, your field, your life, your science. [. . .] Remember, friends, that the educated youth must not be a teacher [. . .], but only a midwife of the people’s liberation [. . .] Do not care about the science, in the name of which they would like to tie you up [. . .] This science should perish together with the world of which it is a representation. A new living science would be surely born later, after the victory of the people, from the liberated life of the people’ (Bakunin, 2014: 158). Radical liberation and ‘decolonization’ of the people inspired a widespread movement of ‘going to people,’ thus, both were shaped in terms of civilization, education and a development project, and, at the same time, were based upon an understanding of the people as a healthy, mighty, but rather primitive force, which must acquire self-consciousness for the liberation. The ‘going to the people’ project became the main idea for a number of political movements of the second half of the 19th century: from the socialist ‘populist’ one (narodniki) to Leo Tolstoy’s followers.

Peasants, thus, were described both as benevolent savages, and as the wild beasts of colonial literature. Even in the beginning of the 20th century, Sergei Witte commented on the condition of the peasants: ‘Russian people, if they had not been Christian and Orthodox people, would have been absolutely animals; the only thing, which makes them different from the animals are those basics of their religion, which were given to them mechanically [. . .] If it had not been so, Russian people with all their illiteracy and absence of any, even the most elementary education, would have been absolutely wild’ (Witte, 1960b: 387). This discourse paradoxically combined what can be described as colonizing and de-colonizing trends: the people for ‘the populist’ (narodnik), always were of the highest value but, at the same time, the project of ‘going to people’ has often been described as a civilizing mission of the intelligentsia (Etkind et al., 2012: 29).

This treatment of the people both as savages in need of civilization, and as the absolute value, was one of the main reasons for some experts to develop a popular thesis of Russia’s ‘internal colonization’. According to this idea, the true Russian Orient was situated inside Central Russia, so that ‘missionary work, ethnography and exotic trips, which have been characteristic phenomena of colonialism, were directed in Russia at inside its own people’ (Etkind et al., 2012: 15). This ‘orientalization’ of Russian people has been implemented through the production of some cultural distance, without which, according to Etkind, there is no colonial situation (Etkind, 2003: 111). From this point of view the very serfdom represented the colonial status of the peasants, while their emancipation was essentially an act of decolonization.

On the one hand, such interpretation of the ‘internal affairs’ of the Russian Empire does shed light upon the exotization and orientalization of ‘the people’ in the 19th century and helps us to see the dialectics of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in the Russian Empire under a very different angle. On the other hand, being essentially a metaphor, the thesis of internal colonialization seems to blur the differences between various types of domination. After all, production and reproduction of cultural distance between dominating and dominated have often been important mechanisms of the domination itself. The examples are numerous: the social estates of Russian society, the castes of the Indian one, even classes in modern capitalist societies. Now, what is Marx’s alienation (estrangement) if not reproduction of various possible distances between nature, human beings and their labor, including, of course, cultural ones (Marx, 1988: 69–84).

Moreover, were the conditions of Russian peasants really unique and different from the circumstances of the lower classes in other European countries? Eugen Weber has famously claimed that ‘there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that vast parts of nineteenth-century France were inhabited by savages’ (Weber, 1976: 3) and that ‘between the 1860s and the 1880s we find repeated references in the reports of primary school inspectors to the progress of civilization and the role of the schools in civilizing the populations in whose midst they operated’ (Weber, 1976: 5). Here we also find both the element of cultural distance linked to the fact of domination as well as an understanding of the necessity to civilize (to develop or to modernize) those internal savages of imperial France. This was, of course, the situation, common to many European countries at this time, when urban modernized elites felt as culturally distant from the traditional rural peasantry as the white colonizers were from the Native Americans in the US Wild West.

The metaphor of internal colonization seems to be generally applicable to the description of the relation between the dominating and dominated or between the modernizing and modernized in the 19th century in the process of nation-building. One can only agree in this respect with Kevin Platt, who claims that ‘if there is a universal history, this is a history of universal oblivion on behalf of all European societies of their own self-colonization in the process of national identity formation. This is a history of how the peasants have been transforming into Frenchmen, Scots into Britishers, and very recently Latvians into Europeans’ (Platt, 2012: 148). Interestingly, the internal colonization metaphor was quite popular in Marxist critiques of capitalist society, interpreting national bourgeoisie as the true colonizers, and the oppressed classes, proletariat and peasantry, as the colonized population. Antonio Gramsci, for example, was quoting a publication of 1920, which described the views of the northern Italian communists in the following way: ‘The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the islands and reduced them to colonies for exploitation. The Northern proletariat through emancipating itself from capitalist slavery will emancipate the Southern peasant masses, who are enslaved to the banks and the parasitic industry of the North’ (Gramsci, 1995: 4).

Now, while the internal colonization thesis does help us to understand better the mechanisms of self-orientalization or self-exotization of Russia, it seems to lump rather uncritically together very different meanings and aspects of colonization. Thus, the well-known Alexander Etkind book on internal colonization of Russia speaks of the colonization of the Siberian lands in the terms of Vasily Klyuchevsky or Sergey Solovyov on internal colonization of the peasants, on German settlements (colonies) in the Volga region, оn the imperial politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, etc. While it does persuasively demonstrate the use of the mechanisms of colonial domination in internal affairs, this approach obviously cannot take into account different types of domination, oppression or modernization and development, because it sees all of them through the lens of the internal colonization theory.

The critics of the internal colonization thesis also charge it with what Jane Burbank called ‘we also had it’ approach. ‘The theory of internal colonization is easily translatable to the language of the Western academic tradition – and maybe too easily to understand the nuances of its application to Russian history’ (Burbank, 2012: 353). The ‘internal colonization’ theory became really handy to understand Russian society and culture in terms of post-colonial studies. This approach might even be useful for uncovering some previously obscure trends. One cannot help wondering, however, if it does not really lose en route some important differences between colonial domination of the ocean empires and serfdom in the Russian continental Empire.

Furthermore, in some situations of domination it is sometimes very difficult to clearly distinguish the agents of such domination. A colonial situation, however, seems to imply always a more or less distinct group of colonizers. For example, on the one hand, 20th century Stalinism has been persuasively interpreted as an internal colonization of the peasant rural country (Gouldner, 1977). On the other hand, it is not clear at all who really were those ‘colonizers’ of Stalinist collectivization and industrialization. Not only does the ‘internal colonization’ thesis seem to mix together very different types of domination, it also blurs a clear boundary between colony and metropole, between colonizers and a colonized population. It, however, proved to be really powerful as a metaphor, describing the use of the colonial methods in internal affairs. What we are now going to argue is that the logic of internal colonization did play an important role in the further development of the approach to colonialism in Russia.

Revolution and decolonization

The Russian revolution of 1917 started, rhetorically at least, as a process of radical decolonization. In the beginning of the 1910s, Sergei Witte wrote in his memoirs: ‘The great Russian Empire during the thousand years of its existence has been formed by the Slavic tribes, who lived in Russia and gradually absorbed by armed force and by other different ways the entire mass of other nationalities. In this way the Russian Empire came into being, and it represents agglomeration of different nationalities, therefore, essentially, there is no Russia, there is only the Russian Empire’ (Witte, 1960a: 129). The Russian revolution, thus, occurred in a country which has never been a national state and Bolsheviks had to deal with this reality. The ‘national question,’ therefore, became one of the most pressing ones, when, during the Civil War of 1917/1918–1922/1923 the minorities’ nationalism turned out to be one of the most powerful drivers of the Revolution.

There are several ways of understanding relations between the Soviet state and the Russian Empire. Some authors argue that the USSR was essentially a continuation of the Russian Empire. Or, as Francine Hirsch described it, ‘before 1917, the Bolsheviks [. . .] had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. [. . .] With the assistance of former imperial ethnographers and local elites, they placed all of the peoples of the former Russian Empire into a definitional grid of official nationalities’ (Hirsch, 2005: 5). In this understanding, Bolsheviks modernized the Empire and made minority nationalism compatible with colonial imperial policy. Decolonization is represented rather as a rhetorical device to hide the highly exploitative character of the Soviet colonial Empire. Arguably this understanding of Soviet power goes far back in the history of the 20th century, and could also be traced, for example, in the Bandung conference discussions, in particular in the Sri Lankan Prime Minister’s demand to censure both Soviet colonialism and Western imperialism (Kumarakulasingam, 2016: 58).

The second way is to consider the Soviet Union as a multiethnic entity of a completely new type, as something which Terry Martin called The Affirmative Action Empire (Martin, 2001). This understanding compelled the admiration for the developmental model of the Soviet Union and its effects in Central Asia at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 (Stolte, 2014: 60), an admiration, which is still shared today by many representatives of the former Soviet intelligentsia, from the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. Martin describes the idea behind the Bolsheviks’ granting self-governance to the minorities as an attempt to harness nationalism, to ‘split the above-class national alliance for statehood. Class divisions, then, would naturally emerge, which would allow the Soviet government to recruit proletarian and peasant support for their socialist agenda’ (Martin, 2001: 5).

For many of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, nationalism had at least several interconnected features. First of all, it was understood as a powerful ideology, masking ‘real’ class interests and, thus, having dangerous potential. Lenin’s famous call ‘to turn ‘national’ war into civil one’ (Lenin, 1969: 31–32) contained an attempt to unmask nationalism as bourgeoisie imperialism and to substitute it with a proletarian ideology of class liberation.

Nationalism, however, is also a necessary stage before internationalism (cf. ‘nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism, and if it manifests divergence we may well suspect a perversion of its nature and its purpose. Such a perversion is Imperialism,’ Hobbson, 1902: 11). Thus, for ‘backward’ peoples, nationalism is rather progressive and tightly connected with their development and modernization. Therefore, after the Revolution, the seemingly pejorative term ‘backward peoples’ substituted for the old inorodtsy, which had been rendered politically incorrect. ‘Backward’ people in the new terminology meant one in need of affirmative action, one in need of special support and development as well as one in need of national consciousness. It is not surprising then that various nationalistic elites made great efforts to get their peoples classified as ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped.’ Thus, ‘after considerable debate, the vast majority of Soviet nationalities were judged culturally backward. Of the Soviet Union’s large titular nationalities, only the Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, and Germans were deemed ‘advanced’ and were grouped together as western nationalities’ (Martin, 2001: 23).

A third fascinating feature of the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the minorities’ nationalism was its intrinsically democratic character. For them it had been directed against Russian ‘chauvinism’ and against the wrong-doings of the old Empire. ‘A distinction must necessarily be made,’ Lenin dictated in 1922, ‘between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and the nationalism of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a large nation and the nationalism of a small nation. [. . .] Thus, internationalism on the part of oppressor or so-called ‘great’ nation [. . .] must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations, but even in an inequality, of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice’ (Lenin, 1970: 358–359). This approach meant support and control of the minority nationalisms, and, at the same time, suppression of any manifestation of Russian nationalism. In other words, the ‘reversed imperial gradient’ of the Russian Empire got in the ‘affirmative action Empire’ its fullest implementation.

Thus, one of the first documents, issued by the new Soviet government, was an appeal ‘to all Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East.’ To ‘internal’ Muslims (it names ‘Muslims of Russia, Tatars of Volga and Crimea, Kirghizes and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Highlanders of Caucasus’) it promises that ‘beliefs and customs, national and cultural institutions will be free and inviolable.’ To all others it preaches world revolution, and claims that ‘enslavement will come not from Russia and its revolutionary Government, but from the predators of European imperialism, who turned your motherland into a despoiled [. . .] colony’ (Lenin & Stalin, 1917).

Such early post-revolution documents contain several really fascinating ideas. First, with all their anti-religious zeal, the Bolsheviks use religious identity together with an ethnic one. Importantly, however, they do so only in the case of the minority nationalism. Thus, there have never been ‘toiling Orthodox people of Russia.’ Muslim identity, however, has been actively supported. Another document, dated June 14, 1918 and signed by Lenin and Trotsky, calls upon Muslims to form a ‘Muslim Socialist Army’ in order to defend the first autonomous national Tatar-Bashkir Republic. The seemingly oxymoronic ‘Muslim proletariat’ is mentioned together with ‘international proletariat’:

So may from all ends of Russia as fiery lava rush victorious revolutionary Muslim warriors to defend the power of workers and the poorest peasants. And we do believe, deeply believe that the Muslim proletariat, awoken to their new great destiny, will bring glorious heroic pages to the history of the revolutionary movement. Hail to the Muslim proletariat, rich with revolutionary spirit! Long live the international proletariat, the creator of the new world truth! (Lenin & Trotsky, 1959: 436)

Secondly, here we find a curious interplay of the ideas of external and internal colonialisms as well as a peculiar dialectic of internationalism/nationalism. Bolshevik internationalism, on the one hand, meant decolonization and anti-imperialism. On the other hand, it also meant proletariat solidarity against bourgeoisie and working towards world revolution. Decolonization and development of the national traditions had the clear aim of getting support from anti-colonial nationalistic movements and to finally direct attention to the main types of exploitation and domination, the class ones. The metaphor of internal colonialism, thus, turned out to be very useful in this respect. According to this metaphor, the true colonizer is the bourgeoisie, while the true colonized people is the proletariat.

Anti-colonial nationalistic movements were conceptualized as anti-imperialistic, and, thus, potentially revolutionary and socialist. Nikolai Bukharin in the beginning of his speech (Report of the Communist International) at the XII Congress of the Bolsheviks’ Party (1923) claimed that ‘apart from the only consistent bearer of the communist uprising, the European and American proletariat, hundreds of millions of the colonial and semi-colonial slaves are taking part in the fight. Hence there is infinite diversity in the struggle conditions [. . .] However, in spite of all differences, we can speak of the united pulse of the social life and revolutionary struggle’ (XII Syezd, 1968: 272). Later he called anti-colonial movements ‘gigantic reserve of revolutionary infantry’ for the Western European and Russian proletariats (XII Syezd, 1968: 265). Finally, he compares large industrial countries with the towns, and Eastern colonies with the villages and calls for the establishment of the ‘great united front of the revolutionary proletariat of the world ‘town’ with the peasantry of the world ‘village’ (XII Syezd, 1968: 326).

Thirdly, the Russians were the only ethnic group not supported by positive discrimination. Following the Lenin’s notes cited above, Bukharin commented on the struggle with ‘great-Russian chauvinism’:

We must say that we, as a former great-power nation, should oppose nationalist aspirations and put ourselves in unequal conditions in the sense of even greater concessions to nationalist trends. Only with such policy [. . .] when we artificially put ourselves in a lower position in comparison with the others, only by paying this price we would be able to buy the true trust of the formerly oppressed nations. (XII Syezd, 1968: 613)

This struggle with Russian nationalism and support of the minority nationalisms presuppose, of course, abandoning the neutrality principle. For Grigory Zinoviev, for example, neutrality is just a disguise of chauvinism, for, in the Soviet Union, ‘every shepherd in Azerbaijan should understand that he has national schools not because communists stood aside and invented the difficult word ‘neutrality,’ but because communists have actively helped him to get what he needs’ (XII Syezd, 1968: 604). Establishment of the multicultural ‘affirmative action Empire,’ thus, was motivated both by the internal and foreign affairs of the Soviet state. It needed, on the one hand, to win over the sympathies of the ‘formerly oppressed nations,’ and, on the other hand, to persuade anti-colonial movements elsewhere to take part in the future world revolution.

Any multiculturalism, however, inevitably faces the internal minorities issue. Contemporary liberal multiculturalism clearly states that ‘liberal principles will [. . .] insist that any national group engaged in a project of nation-building must respect the right of other nations within its jurisdiction to protect and build their own national institutions’ (Kymlicka, 2001: 27). The early Soviet state addressed this issue through the creation of a number of national-territorial units up to the size of a single village. Thus, ‘territorially dispersed nationalities would no longer be threatened with assimilation, and therefore, according to Soviet theory, the potential for defensive nationalism and the resulting ethnic conflict would be defused’ (Martin, 2001: 33). Another mechanism was so-called ‘indigenization’ (korenizatsiya), which involved training of the national elites and providing support to the national language on national territory. The nations and ethnic groups, furthermore, had to be defined, classified and provided with a written language if they still lacked one.

A curious expression of the ideas of affirmative actions and decolonialization can be found in a poem of the once really famous constructivist poet, Ilya Selvinsky. In 1934 he published his drama poem ‘Umka the white bear’ devoted to the establishment of the Soviet regime in Chukotka, the place, where, according to his verses ‘people live, naïve as the myth and experienced as the need’ (Selvinsky, 1973: 25). The poem starts with a description on how the ships from various nations exploited this Northern people: the Americans selling toothpicks, the Japanese bringing opium, and the Russians firing their canons. Only Soviet power brought real emancipation.

The road, however, was difficult. A Soviet missioner from the Caucasus, Arsen Kavaleridze, had to struggle with the Americans, who tried to persuade indigenous people that the communists were the same Russians who had once failed to subordinate Chukcha people (Selvinsky, 1973: 81). He had to fight the local shaman and the natural hostility of the population. The final goal was, of course, to build socialism in Chukotka, for which purpose he had to establish here the first ‘indigenous soviet’ (tuzsovet, Selvinsky, 1973: 69). For that he had to win over the sympathy of the poor Chukcha man named Umka (‘the white bear’), who, sympathizing to Kavaleridze offered him to exchange their wives in accordance with the local tradition of ‘tum-ghetum’ (brothers according to the wives). Kavaleridze had to accept the offer but faced obvious difficulties in providing a reciprocal one: his wife, a refined actor, abhorred by the very thought of observing this tradition. Finally, Umka became the head of the new Chukcha soviet, Kavaleridze gifted to him his favorite pipe and left home together with his wife. The drama became really popular and was successfully performed in the Moscow ‘Theater of Revolution’ until it was prohibited in 1937 with the change of the main political trend.

The main result of all these processes was a very complex multicultural state in the form of the Soviet Union, which used decolonization to effectively control minority nationalisms. At the very beginning this decolonization involved de-russification of the national Republics. Thus, in early 1920s, in Kazakhstan and Kirgizia, the central authorities sanctioned the expulsion of some Slavic agricultural settlers and closed Eastern national territories to agricultural colonization (Martin, 2001: 14–15). This policy, however, had to be abandoned later for the sake of the economic development of the whole Soviet Union.

The word ‘colonization’ in internal affairs was still being used in the old meaning of ‘resettlement’ and ‘developing of the territories.’ Thus, in 1922 a State Research Institute of Colonization (Goskolonit) was established, the main purpose of which was to investigate the different aspects of the resettlement issue. For example, in 1924 it did major research on ‘redundant’ labor in the USSR and proposed transfer of the human resources from the central regions of Russia. Central but scarcely populated areas of the Russian North and Volga regions were listed among the territories for colonization. To differentiate between Soviet colonization and imperial colonies, the researchers of the Goskolonit defined colonization as a state-sponsored development of the territories (Iarilov, 1924: 50–53; Hirsch, 2005: 87–92). Goskolonit was active until 1930 when it merged with the Institute of Economics and Organization of the Socialist Agriculture (Voloshinova, 2014: 274).

Empire of terror

The epoch of terror logically started with the loss of all hopes for a fast world revolution. The unsuccessful revolutions in Central Europe made Trotsky’s permanent revolution sound both unrealistic and dangerous to the Soviet state. Trotsky’s claim of the impossibility for the socialist state to survive without the help of the proletariat from the other states led him to support military interventions on behalf of the Soviet state to ‘push’ the revolutions in other countries. ‘National revolution is not a self-sufficient whole: it is only a link of the international chain. International revolution represents a permanent process, in spite of the temporary lowering and low tides’ (Trotsky, 2014: 9). The defeat of Trotskyism in 1924 paved the way for a new understanding of the nature of the Soviet state.

This understanding was developed by Bukharin, the ‘right-wing’ theorist of the party, and supported by Stalin, who at the XIV Party Congress in 1925 crushed the Leningrad ‘left opposition’ of Zinoviev and Kamenev and introduced Bukharin’s theory of the possibility of building socialism in a separate country. Stalin’s political report at the Congress started with the assertion of the stabilization of European capitalism (XIV Syezd, 1926: 8–12), and concluded with a description of the current Soviet order as ‘transitional from capitalism to socialism’ and with the characterization of state-owned industry as a socialist one (XIV Syezd, 1926: 34). The course to fast industrialization was motivated by the necessity for the Soviet Union to obtain economic independence in the ‘capitalist encirclement’ (XIV Syezd, 1926: 27). Importantly, however, the new state-owned industry was understood now as the main socialist element of the Soviet order (while it had been widely understood previously rather as an element of ‘state capitalism’).

Fast industrialization, however, needed resources, which could not have been taken from colonial exploitation. In the deeply agricultural USSR, these resources could be provided only by the peasants, who, thus, became the main target of Stalin’s government. As Alvin Gouldner explains it: ‘What had been brought into being was an urban-centered power elite that had set out to dominate a largely rural society to which they related as an alien colonial power: it was an internal colonialism mobilizing its state power against colonial tributaries in rural territories’ (Gouldner, 1977: 13). Collectivization turned peasants into serfs, who didn’t have passports, required in the towns, and who, thus, could not leave their collective farms and villages.

Interestingly, the very ideas of hyper-industrialization and of treating the peasantry as an internal colony belonged to Trotsky and one of his allies, the economic theorist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. For them a proletariat state had to go through a ‘primary socialist accumulation’ similar to Marx’s ‘primary accumulation of capital.’ This accumulation, in its turn, would only be possible through the intensive ‘colonial’ exploitation of the peasant population of Russia (Preobrazhensky, 2008). Stalin took this idea, simultaneously crushing ‘right-wing opposition’ led by his former ally, Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed forced collectivization.

In 1936, on the eve of the great terror of 1937–1938, the Extraordinary VIII All-Union Congress of Soviets adopted a new Constitution, which claimed the Soviet Union to be a socialist country. In his opening speech Stalin described the success of industrialization, collectivization and national politics of the Soviet Union. According to him the proposed constitution reflected, first, the fact of the establishment of the socialist order, and, second, the destruction of capitalism in the Soviet Union. He also claimed that the constitution was based upon the absence of antagonistic classes in the Soviet Union, and upon the principle of full equality of all nations and races. Finally, the constitution claimed equality of all citizens and envisaged material guarantees for the exercise of these rights (VIII Syezd Sovyetov, 1936: 14–18). In this speech, Stalin also distinguished between Union and Autonomous Republics, claiming that Union Republics should have the possibilities of exercising their rights for secession, and, thus, must (1) be border republics; (2) have a national majority of their particular nationality; (3) have at least one million inhabitants (VIII Syezd Sovyetov, 1936: 28–29). In general, with the new constitution and the absence of antagonistic classes, the emphasis was transferred from class to national group characteristics. Thus, during the great terror, it was no longer the class enemy who was persecuted, but ‘the enemy of the people’; it is this change which also opened the door for the concept of the ‘enemy nation’ along with the ethnic cleansing and deportations of nationalities.

Thus, the turn to internal colonialism and intensive exploitation of the peasantry was accompanied by important changes in the national policy of Stalin’s regime. First of all, with the defensive foreign policy adopted, the diaspora nationalities (Polish, German, Hungarian, etc.) seen previously as the agents of the revolutionary influence on the corresponding Central European states, started to be considered disloyal because of their nationality. This led to ethnic cleansing, arrests and executions. Secondly, and ‘most dramatically the Russian nationality and Russian national culture were rehabilitated. The Russians and Russian culture were now made the unifying force in a newly imagined Friendship of the Peoples’ (Martin, 2001: 26–27; see also Brandenberger, 2002).

We find one of the first powerful praises of the Russian people in Stalin’s speech at the reception of the participants of the 1^st May Parade in Kremlin on May 2, 1933. Here he claimed that ‘leaving aside the issues of equal rights and self-determination, the Russians are a principal nationality of the world, they first raised the Soviet flag against the whole world. The Russian nation is the most talented nation in the world. Russians have been attacked by all, by the Turks and even Tatars, who attacked for 200 years and could not get control over the Russians, while they were badly armed. If the Russians are armed by the tanks, aviation, navy, they are invincible, invincible’ (Stalin, 2003: 44–45). This ‘Russo-centrism’ became especially strong during and after World War II. At the reception of the Mongolian delegation on February 2, 1943, the day of the victory near Stalingrad, Stalin toasted the Peoples’ Friendship and the Russian people: ‘Russian people gave birth to Lenin. All Soviet peoples have equal rights, but there are firsts among the equals. Russian people are the first among the equals’ (Stalin, 2003: 333). On May 24, 1945 Stalin toasted the Russian people again, ‘because it is the most outstanding nation of all nations of the Soviet Union’ (Stalin, 2003: 470). Stalin’s Russo-centrism naturally found many powerful implementations in the cultural life of the 1930s–1950s (see Brandenberger, 2002).

Thirdly, indigenization (korenizatsiya) was scaled back and, in any case, caution became necessary not to offend the feelings of the Russian people (Martin, 2001: 27). In parallel with all these processes, national identities drifted towards primordialism. If earlier they were understood rather as modern constructed ones, national identities eventually became unavoidably important features of every individual. Martin describes this transformation as an unintentional result of many factors. Among them: nationally defined affirmative actions, which made nationality an important social capital; introduction of passports with a nationality line; the concept of the enemy nations during the fight with diaspora nationalities; enormous attention to folklore and the cult of the popular (Martin, 2001: 449–451). When the passports were first introduced in 1932, everyone could more or less freely choose his or her national identity, however, already in 1938 the NKVD issued a ruling according to which nationality must be determined according to the parents’ nationality. The result was a fundamental shift in Soviet imaginary from class to national identity. As Martin describes it: ‘After 1933, there was a shift in emphasis from class to people (narod). We have seen this in the transition from class-based to ethnically based deportation, from the persecution of class enemies to enemies of the people, and in turn from an emphasis on class militancy to a society imagined as consisting of a powerful, paternalistic state and a largely undifferentiated, demobilized people’ (Martin, 2001: 449).

The general idea, which united all nations of the Soviet Union in one whole, was the imaginary of the Peoples’ Friendship, a special relation between the primordially defined nationalities, united together in the Soviet Union by the great Russian people understood as primus inter pares, whose role now was to be symbolically recognized and glorified. This primordial understanding of the nation, inherited by contemporary Russia, became now one of the stumbling blocks in defining the civic nation. Both terms ‘Russian people’ and ‘Russian nation’ (rossiyskaya natsiya, different from russkaya natsiya, which means ‘Russian ethnos’) are not really accepted today because of the fear of the other ethnic groups that these terms could produce, by designating only ethnically Russian people (see for example Tishkov, 2007).

Anticolonial, too colonial

The late USSR seems to have combined very different trends in dealing with national republics and foreign countries. It inherited both early Soviet affirmative actions and Stalinist primordialism; it combined anticolonial spirit with military domination in satellite countries; it provided support for international fighters for freedom and suppressed the Prague spring. In general, it seems that very often it behaved both as a colonial empire and as a leader of an anti-colonial struggle. It is also not implausible that this contradiction was among the numerous causes which led the USSR to the collapse of 1991.

First of all, in the 1960s, after the denunciation of Stalin’s ‘personality cult’ and the rejection of the methods of ethnic cleansing and ethnically-based deportations, a new imaginary concept was officially introduced as a sort of civic identity for all nations and groups of the Soviet Union. In his speech at the XXII Party Congress in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev claimed that the party ‘solved [. . .] the problem of the relations between nations. Tsarist Russia was called ‘prison of the peoples’. Soviet Union is called brotherly family of peoples, the country of the friendship and blooming of the nations. [. . .] Formerly backward peoples with the help of more developed ones, and first of all, with the help of the great Russian people, escaped the capitalist way and rose to the level of the advanced ones. A new historic community of the people of the different nationalities has been formed in Russia [. . .]: Soviet people’ (XXII Syezd, 1962: 153).

The term ‘new historic community: Soviet people’ became a necessary part of the official discourse after the XXIV Party Congress which, in 1971, mentioned in its resolution: ‘The Congress states that the last period is characterized by comprehensive progress and further convergence of all nations and nationalities (narodnostey) of our country. The remarkable achievements of the peoples of the USSR are the result of their united work, of the consistent implementation of the national policy of the CPSU. In the process of socialist building a new historic community of the human beings has been formed, one of Soviet people’ (XXIV Syezd, 1971: 231).

Slightly later this term took the almost oxymoronic form of ‘new historic community: multinational Soviet people.’ Nations here were understood, on the one hand, as a result of regional nation-building, but, on the other hand, still retained the primordial substratum called in the Soviet language nationality (ethnos). Generally, nations were widely interpreted as ethnic communities with a common economic life, thus uniting primordial and social characteristics. Thus, for a well-known ethnographer and historian of this time, Julian Bromley, a nation was ‘an ethno-social organism’ (Bromley, 1972: 86–89). This complex interplay of primordial and socially contracted elements created the peculiar phenomenon of Soviet nationalities, which ‘were constantly shaped by the state-initiated transformation of the Soviet years. Their pasts were constructed and reconstructed; traditions were selected, invented, and enshrined; and even those with the greatest antiquity of pedigree became something quite different from past incarnations’ (Suny, 1993: 160).

In this respect the Soviet Union was really a multi-national state with 15 Union Republics engaged in their own nation-building on the regional level, while the unity of the whole was provided by the purely civic identity of the Soviet people, which was considered to be the result of the Peoples’ Friendship. Interestingly, in the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s, the number of those who still associated themselves with the Soviet people was 46% in 1992, and 52% in May 1998 (Danilova, 2000: 79). Whatever we make out of these fascinating data, they do demonstrate how strong this identity has really been.

This complex interplay of the primordial and socially constructed in the Soviet understanding of the nation, nationality (ethnos) and the people, enabled, on the one hand the Soviet Union to a certain degree to effectively manage and control minority nationalisms, but, on the other hand, is partly responsible for the recent difficulties of the contemporary Russian Federation to find an effective substitute for the identity of Soviet people. It also partly explains the current rise of ethnic nationalism in other former Union Republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ethnic nationalism turned out to be an easy substitute for the lost Soviet identity. Nevertheless, of course, rising ethnic nationalism was one of the causes for the weakening of this civic identity itself.

In dealing with colonial and post-colonial worlds, the Soviet Union positioned itself as a leader of all liberation and anti-colonial movements. Some of the traditions of the affirmative action Empire were not only retained in the later Soviet Union, but were also expanded to a larger foreign territory, made of colonial and postcolonial countries.

Thus, for example, Soviet higher education policy in the late 1980s included group affirmative actions for at least three reasons. The first was class considerations: those who worked for a certain number of years after graduation from high school had a right to enroll on a one-year preparatory course (rabochiy fakultet or rabfak). After successful graduation from the rabfak, the young workers were admitted to university almost automatically. The second was national. Students from national republics took their exams at home and according to their scores could enroll in various prestigious universities in the main Russian cities. The third group entitled for the affirmative actions consisted of the elites from other socialist countries, as well as members of different liberation and anticolonial movements, of foreign workers organizations, etc. The Soviet Union provided free higher education, along with a small bursary, for all these groups. The Russian Federation inherited the practice of providing scholarships for international students as a part of its soft power strategy and is still allocating 15,000 free university places for international students.

Education policy is just one example. Various types of affirmative actions existed in politics (political representation at the Union level in the House of Nationalities, complex political arrangements inside of the Union Republics), economics (subsidies of various types), culture (support of national languages, theaters, literature, music), etc. Although the national Republics were in very different positions, ‘all non-Russians in the Soviet Union experienced to a greater or lesser degree a gain in their potential capacity to represent themselves as nations’ (Suny, 1993: 159). In the Soviet Union ‘the non-Russian republics, particularly those of the south, benefited from cheap Russian resources, investment, and factory production, as well as from Russians who migrated as laborers to their regions’ (Suny, 1993: 130). The investments were sometimes radical, not justified economically, but could be very important in humanitarian terms. Thus, for example, at some period of time, there were up to 14 daily flights from the Tajikistan capital Dushanbe to Khorog, the center of the high mountain Pamir region (Pamir, 2019). Today there is no regular avian connection between these cities, and people have to take the rather dangerous old high mountain motorway for twelve to sixteen hours (520 km).

And still the Soviet Union did fall with really surprising speed. This collapse however was not simply a product of the popular national Republics’ resentment. The Soviet Union collapsed under the influence, among other things, of the nascent Russian nationalism, which demanded to abandon the Union Republics together with all affirmative actions in their favor. Continuing support of the developing countries during the situation of the severe economic crisis inside the Soviet Union itself became another object of resentment. Thus, according to Ronald Suny, although after Stalin’s nationalistic turn ‘Russians and Slavs were overrepresented in institutions of power,’ ‘many ethnic Russians felt burdened by the ‘costs’ of the Empire and ‘exploited’ by the peripheries. At least a semblance of nationhood had been permitted to the major non-Russian peoples, whereas Great Russians were much more limited in manifesting their ethnic national aspirations or enjoying the institutions and privileges of nation-state. Buried within a federation within a federation, the Russian ‘nation’ experienced the same sense of peril that smaller peoples of the Soviet Union felt’ (Suny, 1993: 129).

Affirmative actions, favorable investments in the national Republics, in short, continuation of the ‘reverse imperial gradient,’ thus played important roles in the collapse of the Soviet project. With Gorbachev’s political reforms, nationalistic forces hijacked the ‘revolution from above’ inside the Russian Federation itself. Higher standards of living of many Caucasians or Central Asians were the source of the resentment of Russians in time of the crisis and in any case ‘confirmed for Russians their belief that the mode of exploitation in the USSR ran from center to periphery, rather than from colony to metropole as in more traditional empires’ (Suny, 1993: 130).

Now, when, on March 17, 1991 a referendum on the destiny of the Soviet Union was held, only six Republics out of fifteen refused to organize it. Apart from the three Baltic Republics, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia decided to boycott it. However, 148.5 million people took part in the referendum (80% of all Soviet Union citizens), and 76.43% answered ‘yes’ to the question on the preservation of the Soviet Union. The exceptions, however, are quite telling: the only city (together with its region), which voted against the USSR, was Sverdlovsk (today Yekaterinburg, the home city of Boris Yeltsin) with only 34.17% of positive votes; in Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) the votes in favor of the USSR were slightly more than 50% (Vokhmin, 2011; Soobsheniye, 1991). Thus, the lowest support for the Soviet Union was among Russian urban elites.

The collapse of Soviet Union, thus, happened in a very different way from the fall of the main European empires. It has never been a result of the popular mobilization for liberation or anti-colonial struggle. It is quite possible to conceptualize the fall of the Second world as a refusal of the center (Russia) to support the Union Republics in the situation of the economic, political and social crisis accompanied by the attempt of national elites to retain power in the situation of a growing political and economic uncertainty. One of the causes of the collapse, then, was the very discourse of affirmative actions, combined with the perception of the nations as primordially defined, and complicated by the idea of Russian people as the great gatherer of the nations.

When the imaginary of the Soviet people was shaken (with the fall of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which has always been considered as an important element of this civic identity), the Russian nation seems to have lost the motivation to support the other nations of the USSR. ‘The fiction of a united sovetskii narod, proposed and defended by Soviet theorists of ethnicity, certainly reflected important shared characteristics of many educated urban Soviet citizens, but it was belied by the powerful identification with nationality not only of those villagers untransformed by the Soviet experience, but also of many intellectuals’ (Suny, 1993: 139).

In the political propaganda of this time, the Soviet Union has been often pictured as a prison for Russian people, with Russia understood as a loser (or even sometimes very paradoxically, as a semi-colony of the Union). Moreover, in much of the mass culture of the late 1980s-beginning of 1990s, some of the Republics (especially Central Asian ones) were represented as semi-feudal morally corrupt places. Thus, many of the films, shot in the late 1980s-beginning of the 1990s in the Central Asian Republics were devoted to corruption, the mafia and the moral decay of power. This image has been very much strengthened by the so-called ‘cotton case,’ which uncovered corruption among high officials of the Uzbek Republic and allegedly among the leaders of the federal center in Moscow (including Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov). That is why it is not really surprising that despite the expressed desire to preserve the Soviet Union, eight months after the referendum, when the three presidents of the Slavic countries of the USSR (Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) declared abolishment of the Soviet Union, it didn’t cause any serious protests or disobedience.

As a result, contemporary Russia still shares the same imaginary of ethnic national identities as semi-primordial, semi-social ones. Nations today are much smaller, of course, and located in numerous Autonomous Republics inside the Russian Federation. Ironically, such was initially Stalin’s plan for the structure of the USSR, one forcefully rejected by Lenin. In any case, Russia still lacks a proper ‘umbrella’ civic national identity, although the old word rossiyskoye (Russian as belonging to the Russian state) is increasingly used in a consistent way to designate such identity in contrast to russkoye (Russian as belonging to Russian ethnos).

Anyway, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained a multi-national Federation and had to address the same issues, which led to the events of the late 1980s-beginning of 1990s. Thus, according to Ronald Suny, the fundamental Soviet dilemma, which Mikhail Gorbachev had to face, was ‘how to democratize and modernize the largest country on the globe while maintaining the last multinational empire’ (Suny, 1993: 137). Empire or not, contemporary Russia, being a multinational federation, had to face the same old dilemma as well as to deal with the consequences of the Soviet past: the interdependence of the post-Soviet countries, the nostalgic emotional attachment of many former Soviet citizens to the old union, as well as the existence of large pockets of ethnically Russian people inside the territories of the newly independent countries. All these issues are still there, 30 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the world map.

Some conclusions

Russia was an odd empire: it came into being not as a normal modern colonial empire, and it was destroyed also not in a very usual way for an empire (if, of course, we are ready to see the Soviet Union as a continuation of the old colonial ways). This was an empire where the center was often oppressed for the sake of the periphery; an empire which, in the 20th century, supported all anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements; a colonial empire with large ethnically and nationally defined peripheries, which has invariably rejected the very name ‘colony’ as applicable to the national regions and which officially used the term ‘colonization’ almost exclusively in the meaning of ‘resettlement.’ The difficulty in understanding such an empire led some authors to describe it in terms of internal colonization. This theory does have several important advantages and seemingly numerous drawbacks.

Tsarist Russia was an empire by name and by essence. As a continental empire, however, it always sought to internalize the external, to expand state territory through a complex process of acquiring and colonizing (settlement) new territories. These territories were proper colonies, since the process of their appropriation involved transfer of population, settlement on the lands which were considered empty, maintaining control over new settlements, as well as submission and integration of the indigenous population. Racial categories were used, but not too consistently. This inconsistency demonstrates an always-present tension between the trend of considering newly acquired lands as culturally separate ‘colonies,’ and at the same time the desire to integrate these lands in the national territory and to interpret the process of colonization as the expansion of the Russian state. Centuries of such colonization resulted in the formation of a peculiar type of imperial personality, which has been later conceptualized by Slavophil authors as an ‘all-human’ one. At the same time it was the ‘metropole,’ the center, and not the ‘colony,’ the periphery, which was subjected to the most severe oppression. This fact brought some scholars to introduce the concept of the ‘reversed imperial gradient’ of the Empire.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Empire had acquired huge continental territory and had the ambitions to reach as far as Korea and China in the Far East, and Constantinople in the Mediterranean. By the time the October Revolution stopped this process, Russia became by far the largest continental empire in the world. It is only natural then, that the main purpose and justification of the imperial power, started at least in the 17th century, became the control of these vast areas. Some of these territories were quite densely populated, many of them, however, until present times were effectively empty. Thus, the primary objects of control became both nature and the peoples, climate and ‘aliens,’ vast empty spaces and scarce human resources.

This was the main source of the Russian version of the modernity of control, whose underlying signification was the rational mastery of the world, which became an absolute priority at the expense of the individual or collective autonomy. Two types of science started to dominate the imperial knowledge-production system: transport engineering and ethnography. Both clearly served the purpose of internalization of the territorially and culturally external as well as helping to control nature and population.

This control, however, was lost, when, during the hardships of the First World War, the October Revolution halted the transformation of Russia into a modern colonial empire. The Bolsheviks, on the one hand, used the internal colonization thesis to direct attention to the class struggle, so that the international bourgeoisie would be seen as the main oppressors, and, on the other hand, started a project of comprehensive decolonization and development of the national areas of the Empire. Attention to the class struggle was accompanied by a system of affirmative actions intended to harness minority nationalism. The ‘reversed gradient’ persisted in the consideration of the great Russian nation as the former colonizer, which had to pay its historical debt to the formerly oppressed peoples. This version of the modernity of control necessarily admitted some forms of liberation and autonomy but displaced them either to the near future (towards the expected socialist revolution of the world) or to the formerly oppressed periphery. Tightening of control started from the very center of power: the Communist Party itself. The great terror began with crushing Trotskyism and ‘left opposition’ and continued with the destruction of the ‘right-wing deviation’ of Bukharin.

These processes were triggered by weakening hopes for the immediate world revolution and by the idea of the possibility of socialism in one separate country. As a result, through the severe control and exploitation of the peasant population of the agrarian Soviet Union, the Party tried to get necessary resources for the fast industrialization of the country. What other countries were getting from their oversea colonies, Stalin’s regime squeezed from the hungry peasants. The tightening of control was accompanied by the primordialization of nations, with symbolic rehabilitation of the great Russian people, and with the substitution of the class terminology for an ethnic one. Thus, instead of ‘the class enemy’ Stalin’s regime persecuted ‘the enemies of the people’ and sometimes even entire ‘enemy nations.’ Tightened control became totalitarian terror. Autonomy and freedom were moved to the very distant communist future, while real present time was considered to be the proper territory for the increasing mastery of the natural and social worlds.

The later Soviet Union was a creation of both Khrushchev’s ‘warming’ and Brezhnev’s reaction. The optimism of the close communist future was incorporated into the idea of the civic identity, ‘the new historic community: the multinational Soviet people.’ With nations understood as ethno-social communities, the later Soviet Union combined traditions of class-, nation- and ideology-based affirmative actions with a tight ‘scientific’ control of nature and society. The optimism of the 1960s was changed with the indifference of the 1970s and the decline of the 1980s. Short-lived rises of the imaginaries of autonomy and freedom in the 1960s were again substituted for different forms of control over nature and society. In the later Soviet Union the discourse of emancipation was mostly aimed at the colonial and postcolonial Third World, while internal affairs were managed with the traditional Soviet methods of 5-year plans, various types of affirmative action and the construct of the civic identity of ‘Soviet people.’ The collapse of the ideology led to the destruction of this powerful imaginary and, finally, to the rejection on behalf of the Russian federal center of controlling both national Republics and satellite countries.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the modernity of control still very much persists in post-Soviet Russia. After the short euphoria of freedom and social collapse of the 1990s, Putin’s Russia moves along the same old lines of control over the territories and population. This explains both current attempts to return to some traditional forms of ideological ties such as Orthodoxy or national patriotism, and various border issues, such as the Ukraine affair of 2014. It seems obvious that the annexation of Crimea, participation in the Syrian war, Georgian and then Ukrainian incidents are best explained not by the putative imperial mentality of the Russian people, but by the regime’s obsession with security which is a part and parcel of what we call the modernity of control.

Today’s trajectory of this modernity, however, lacks some important elements, which have previously been present. Among them there are an umbrella civic identity or the imaginary of the ‘Peoples’ Friendship’ of Soviet times, the powerful imaginary of the mastery of nature in both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and, most importantly, the displacement of autonomy and emancipation either in time (communism) or in space (anti-colonial struggle). Without such displacement, emancipation is necessarily becoming an important present-day concern. All these characteristics seem to make today’s modernity of control rather unsustainable.

The national territories of Russia or the Soviet Union as well as the colonial and postcolonial countries of the 20th century, thus, were important elements of the modernity of control. If in the Empire they were seen as objects of appropriation and control, together with the main parts of central Russia (although for many runaway Russian peasants they were places of proper freedom), the Soviet regime projected to them the ideas of emancipation, thus making the central parts the objects to control. In this way the Soviet Union managed to combine semi-imperial politics with the support of liberation movements and anticolonial struggle. This combination still seems to keep defining many things in contemporary Russia, including the possibilities of its active participation in such Global South gatherings as the BRICS club. Russia represents today the Global South and Global North simultaneously, former Empire and former colony; it traditionally supports anti-colonial left governments and is engaged in right-wing semi-imperialistic politics. The claim of this article is that this is partly explained by the complex history and inherited imaginaries of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.

Now it turns out that Russia after all shares some important features with other BRICS countries. All of them to some degree had intensive imperial and colonial experience. However, with all their capacities in terms of world-ordering, all of them are rather misrepresented in the current world governance structures. All of them are multicultural, multinational, and, in the majority of cases, multi-racial countries. To a certain extent the modernity of control clinged to many of them (for example in the form of apartheid control of racial relations in South Africa or of the control over vast empty spaces in the Russian Empire).

In its turn, the internal plurality of cultures, nations or races makes it an especially difficult task for all the BRICS nations to find an overarching civic identity. Russia of the Soviet times tried to obtain it through the fiction of the multinational Soviet people, in South Africa there were talks of the ‘rainbow nation’ or politics of non-racialism, Brazil since Getúlio Vargas’s time has been offering a vision of ‘racial democracy’ or ‘racial continuum,’ India tried to find it in state secularism, and the Chinese vision is still based upon a reformed Marxist ideology of internationalism, combined with Chinese specificity. Each of these five countries in its own way is trying to find solutions to what Ronald Suny called ‘Gorbachev’s dilemma’: how to modernize and democratize a multinational state (Suny, 1993: 137). Or, to put it in another way: how to maintain the unity of a nation when the displacement of autonomy and freedom, so characteristic of the modernity of control, is not a viable option anymore. The Russian historical experience demonstrates that the task is rather formidable, but that the failure to address this kind of issue properly is fraught with far-reaching consequences, up to the danger of disintegration of this multinational country.