Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

Alexander Etkind

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

RUSSIA'S IMPERIAL EXPERIENCE

ALEXANDER ETKIND

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Copyright © Alexander Etkind 2011

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vi

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction 1

Part I The Non-Traditional Orient

Less than One and Double 13

Worldliness 27

Part II Writing from Scratch

Chasing Rurik 45

To Colonize Oneself 61

Barrels of Fur 72

Part III Empire of the Tsars

Occult Instability 93

Disciplinary Gears 123

Internal Affairs 150

Part IV Shaved Man's Burden

Philosophy Under Russian Rule 173

Sects and Revolution 194

Re-Enchanting the Darkness 214

Sacrificial Plotlines 231

Conclusion 249

References 257

Index 283

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

Igor Smirnov, Nancy Condee, Svetlana Boym, and Mark Lipovetsky gave this work early and invaluable encouragement. Oleg Kharkhordin, Irina Prokhorova, Irene Masing-Delic, and Alastair Renfrew edited the first versions of some of these ideas; their long-standing support is much appreciated. Conversations with Gyan Prakash helped me receive some wisdom from the mainstream of postcolonial studies. Eli Zaretsky and John Thompson were instrumental in making me write it all down. An exciting conference, Russia's Internal Colonization, which Dirk Uffelmann and I organized at the University of Passau - an adventure from which we, along with Ilia Kukulin, have still not returned - resuscitated my interest in the subject. Simon Franklin, Emma Widdis, Rory Finnin, Jana Howlett, Caroline Humphrey, and Harald Wydra have been wonderful colleagues throughout these years.I presented parts of this book at the brown-bag seminar of the Slavonic Department of Cambridge University, a "Found in Translation" conference at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, a Eurasian conference at Hangyang University in Seoul, and also at lively seminars at Durham, Sodertorn, and Stanford. The questions and comments of colleagues in these and other places found their way into this book. Several scholars read parts of this manuscript and commented generously. They are, in chronological order, Willard Sunderland, Maria Maiofis, Simon Franklin, William Todd, Mark Bassin, Dirk Uffelmann, Marina Mogilner, Eric Naiman, David Moon, Ruben Gallo, Michael Minden, Peter Holquist, Jana Howlett, Valeria Sobol, Jane Burbank, and Tony La Vopa. Sarah Lambert, Sarah Dancy, and two anonymous reviewers of Polity Press were very helpful.

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Joseph Swain, "Save me from my friends!", 1878. 33

Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working

on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. 40

Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov, Rurik's Arrival

at Ladoga, 1909. 46

Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov, portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815). 54

Figure 5: Aleksei Olenin, Demeter-Ceres, a Greek-Roman

Goddess 1812. 57

Figure 6: Vasilii Surikov, Ermak's conquest of

Siberia, 1895. 80

Figure 7: Coat of Arms of the Stroganovs, 1753. 85

Figure 8: The coat of arms of Abram Gannibal (c. 1742). 96

Figure 9: Karl Briullov, A Portrait of an Officer

with his Servant (1830s). 117

Figure 10: Johann Reinhold Forster. The map of German

colonies on the Volga,1768. 130

Figure 11: A cavalry training ring in Selishche,

near Novgorod, built in 1818-25. 137

Figure 12: The Perovsky descendants of Aleksei

Razumovsky (1748-1822). 153

Figure 13: Karl Briullov, Vasilii Perovsky on the capital

of a column, 1824. 154

Figure 14: Pushkin and Dal presented on

an icon as St Kozma and St Damyan. 163

Figure 15: Andrei Bolotov's self-portrait, c. 1790. 183

Figure 16: Afanasii Shchapov, 1872. 195

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

1918. 209

Figure 18: Ilia Repin. Portrait of Nikolai Leskov, 1888. 225

Introduction

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

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

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

Exploring the historical experience of the Russian Empire before the revolutionary collapse of 1917, this book illuminates its relevance for postcolonial theory. However, I turn the focus onto Russia's inter­nal problems, which have not previously been discussed in postcolo- nial terms. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in the causes and results of the Russian revolution has paled in comparison to the explosion of research on the Russian Orient, orientalism, and Empire.[2]

Historians have learned to avoid the Soviet-style, teleological approach to the revolution and the terror that followed, which explains the preceding events as "the preparation" for the subsequent ones. However, historians - and all of us - need explanations for why the Russian revolution and the Stalinist terror occurred on the terri­tory of the Russian Empire. Such explanations cannot be sought exclusively in the preceding era, but they, or at least a part of them, also cannot be disconnected from the historical past. I do not aim to explain the revolution, but I do believe that a better grasp of imperial Russia can help us toward a clearer understanding of the Soviet century. I am also trying to bridge the gap between history and litera­ture, a gap that few like but many maintain. Some time ago, Nancy Condee formulated the idea that while area studies is an interdisci­plinary forum, cultural studies "incorporate[s] interdisciplinarity into the project itself" (1995: 298). This book is a project in cultural studies.

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

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

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