Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part I

The Non-Traditional Orient

Less than One and Double

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

Career of Improvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1836, Gogol described St. Petersburg as "something similar to a European colony in America: there are as few people of the native ethnicity here [St. Petersburg] and as many foreigners who have not yet been amalgamated into the solid mass" (1984: 6/162). Like many Russian intellectuals of his time, Gogol was very interested in America and even dreamed about emigration to the US. Comparing the impe­rial capital to America sounded good to this outsider. In a remarkable twist, the conservative Russians of the 1840s employed the language of colonial discontent for their criticism against their own culture. A former officer of the Imperial Guard, Aleksei Khomiakov, wrote in 1845 that in Russia, the Enlightenment took "a colonial character."

In 1847, he characterized the educated society in Russia as "a colony of eclectic Europeans, thrown into a country of savages." He also stated that the enlightened Russia "fashioned itself in an aggressive way, like a European colony anywhere in the world, conceiving the conquest with best intentions but without means to realize them and . . . without a superiority of spirit that could give some kind of justification for the conquest." He characterized this "colonial relationship" as "the struggle" between "the entirely unjustified repulsion" on the part of the elite toward the people and "the well-justified suspicion" on the part of the people towards the elite. On this base, Khomiakov diagnosed in the Russian society "fundamental doubling," "imitativeness," "false half-knowledge," "a lifeless orphanhood," and "cerebral deadliness." Like his favorite writer, Gogol, he loved the metaphor of doubling/splitting (razdvoe- nie) and used it profusely. Doubling was induced by the Petrine reforms but increased after that. Doubling was an unavoidable result of too abrupt, too rapid social change. Doubling separated the life of the people and the life of the higher estates. "Where the society is doubled - a deadly formalism reigns the day" (Khomiakov 1988: 100, 43, 152, 96, 139). Much earlier, Khomiakov (1832) wrote a tragedy about the legendary Ermak, a Cossack who conquered Siberia for the Russian crown. Far from glorifying Ermak, it shows a repent­ing criminal, cursed by his father, convicted by the Tsar, and betrayed by the fellow Cossacks. A Shaman offers him the crown of Siberia, but he prefers suicide. If it were a story about Montezuma, it would have been perceived as an early and strong anti-imperial statement; Ermak has never been successful on stage, with either the critics or the historians. Khomiakov spent many years writing a multi-volume saga of peoples' migrations and resettlements, starting from the anti­quity. An Anglophone and Anglophile, he speculated about the colo­nized Celts, Indians, and Hottentots. Colonial practices were in his mind, whether he was writing about Russia or the world. One of the most gifted people of his time - an amateur engineer, artist, historian, and theologian - Khomiakov was piously Orthodox, like other Slavophiles, but in his own creative way (Engelstein 2009). Through the years, he corresponded with a cleric from Oxford about a unifica­tion of Orthodox and Anglican churches; he even believed that the same could happen with the Calvinists (Khomiakov 1871: 105).

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

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

the non-traditional orient Slavic Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

Boomerang Effect

In the 1920s, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci characterized the relations between different regions of his country, the north and the south, as colonial exploitation. Better than his predecessors, he real­ized the internal complexity of this intra-ethnic colonization. Its cultural vector, which he called hegemony, diverged from its political vector (domination) and its economic vector (exploitation). All three had to be considered separately, because their directions were differ­ent or even the opposite. Regions of southern Italy became northern Italy's "exploited colonies" but, at the same time, the culture of the south strongly influenced that of the north (Gramsci 1957: 28, 48). In fact, it was due to the internal structure of Italian colonialism that

Gramsci was able to separate these elements of power, which corre­late and stick to each other in many situations of external, overseas colonization. Revising the Marxist teaching that the economic basis determines the "superstructure," Gramscian concepts of hegemony and domination proved to be seminal for cultural and postcolonial studies. Conceived in Italy, they have been applied in India and else­where (Guha 1997).

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

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

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

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

Tashkent, but it is there that he would receive a critical experience that enabled him to "civilize" Russia. In several funny stories, the gentlemen from Tashkent beat and bribe the gentlemen in Petersburg, assuming it as a part of their civilizing mission. If you find yourself in a town that has a prison and does not have a school, you are in the heart of Tashkent, wrote the satirist. Like Major Kovalev who lost his nose when he returned from the Caucasus, the imperial returnees confront a catastrophe that they purposefully create and deeply misunderstand. Focusing on the return arc of the imperial boomerang, from the colony to the mother country, Saltykov- Shchedrin defined the internal Orient - in his terms, "Tashkent-ness" - as a combination of violence and ignorance that he discerned in the exchange between the Russian center and its colonies (Saltykov- Shchedrin 1936: 10/29-280).

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

Recent decades have seen a historiographical revolution that has been mostly focused on the role of the state, coercion, and war in the creation of the modern world (Tilly 1990; Bartlett 1993; Mann 1996). Michael Mann observes that in modern history, settler colo­nies of democratic countries were more murderous than the colonies of authoritarian empires. Liberal democracies were built on the back of ethnic cleansing, which took the form of institutional coercion in mother countries and of mass murder in the colonies. As long as empires were able to sustain the plural "sociospatial networks of power" in their diverse parts, they could escape massive bloodshed. With the transition to the "organic view of society," empires break into nation-states, a process which is usually accompanied by large- scale violence. New nation-states regulate their complexity by redraw­ing boundaries, organizing population transfers, and sanctioning ethnic cleansing. For Mann (2005), this is the "dark side of democ­racy," the modern heart of darkness, to use an older metaphor.

In Russia, organic nationalism started during the Napoleonic Wars and was maturing all the way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marking one of its turning points. The fact that it has never fully matured explains both the weakness of Russian democracy and the relative bloodless- ness of recent Russian transformations (Hosking 1997). Despite their defining importance for the modern world, these processes have been under-theorized. In a rare postcolonial response to the post-Soviet transformation, David Chioni Moore describes a situation that he calls "the double silence." Postcolonial experts stay silent about the former Soviet sphere and Sovietologists stay silent about postcolonial ideas. Moore gives two separate explanations to this double effect. For many postcolonial scholars, some of them Marxist-leaning, the socialist world seems a better alternative to global capitalism; they do not wish to extend their critical vision from the latter to the former. Many post-socialist scholars have cultivated their new European identities; they do not wish to compare their experience with Asian or African colleagues (Moore 2001: 115-17). Several commentators have shared Moore's surprise (Condee 2006, 2008; Buchowski 2006; Chari and Verdery 2009). Both sides suffer from the disjunction between the postcolonial and the post-socialist. This disconnect is largely responsible for the much-deplored depoliticiza- tion of postcolonial studies and for the methodological parochialism that many Russianists have lamented. The reasons for this disconnect are both political and academic. As Nancy Condee put it: "[T]he intellectual Left's silence about the Second world and the Right's anticommunist preoccupations were interrelated processes, mutually enforcing constraints" (2008: 236). I would add only that in the twenty-first century, the continuation of the Left's silence about the past and the lasting present of the Second World can be explained only by inertia.

I propose in this book to take a step back. Not only is the post- Soviet era postcolonial (though still imperial), the Soviet era was postcolonial too. The Russian Empire was a great colonial system both at its distant frontiers and in its dark heartlands. Employed by Bismarck, Lenin, and Hitler; mentioned by Weber, Foucault, and Habermas; and, with slightly different wording, developed by nine­teenth-century Russian historians (see Chapter 4), the concept of internal colonization has a deeper genealogy than is usually assumed. To be sure, extending the postcolonial edifice, which has never been very coherent, to the immense space of the Russian Empire requires not just an "application" of the pre-existing ideas, but their deep refashioning. Doing so might help us to understand not only the Russian imperial experience, but also the unused potentialities of postcolonial theory.

Worldliness

Two very different authors, Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, relied on a rare concept that they used independently of one another. This concept was "worldliness." Writing about humanity in dark times, Arendt revealed how people respond to the collapse of the public sphere by pressing up against each other, mistaking "warmth" for "light," and escaping into the worldlessness, "a form of barbarism" (1968: 13). Also writing about dark times, Said protested against the popular idea that literature has a life of its own, a life that is separate from history, politics, and other worldly matters (see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 33; Wood 2003: 3). Worldliness is important for reading Gogol, and no less so for Conrad or Kipling. But there are always many worlds on earth; during the Cold War, there were offi­cially three.

Three Worlds

Writing during the Cold War, Edward Said defined "Orientalism" as the way in which the First World has treated the Third World. In this abstract formulation, he skipped the Second World entirely. In his introduction to Orientalism (1978), Said spoke of the Cold War, "an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West," as the very first of historical circumstances that made his study pos­sible. Indeed, the idea of three worlds came into being around 1955 and expressed western anxiety about the growing appeal of the USSR among the former colonies - the penetration of the Second World into the Third (Sachs 1976; Pletsch 1981; Moore 2001). In the 1970s, the USSR was relevant enough for Said to write: "No one will have failed to note how the 'East' has always signified danger and threat . . . even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia" (1978: 26). In this beginning of Said's work, the east embraced two major entities, the traditional Orient and the non-traditional one, which was Russia. The subsequent parts of Said's book exclusively discussed relations between the west and "the traditional Orient." The non-traditional part of the east was left for further consideration.

Speaking of an Orient that stretched from the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea to those of the Indian Ocean to the Southern Pacific, i.e. along the borders of the Russian Empire, Said showed that European policies toward this part of the east were accompanied by a public focus on captured territories and their inhabitants; that knowledge about colonial peoples defined the world of those who ruled them and the ways they were governed; and that the great texts of the western tradition were not "innocent" of imperialism but persistently alluded to the colonial experience. Said attacked tradi­tional orientalism for imagining the east and the west as self-sufficient Platonic essences, which split the imperial mind into a "Manichean delirium."

Subsequent critics have corrected Said's arguments in many respects. Using British examples, David Cannadine (2001) showed that the cultural traffic between the capital and the colonies was actually reciprocal. The British who mimicked Indians and other colonials in food or spirituality comprised the rule rather than the exception. Even more importantly, Brits projected onto their subjects a presump­tion of affinity rather than difference, so that they could deal with familiar hierarchies rather than with exotic and dangerous disorder. Writing about German colonialism, Russell Berman (1998) showed that the cultural logic of orientalism changed its patterns when it worked in western empires other than the French and the British. In Berman's account, German missionaries and scholars were more attentive to the natives and did not deprive their informants of human agency to the extent that was typical of their British and French col­leagues. Orientalism was a specific cultural pattern, variable in dif­ferent situations. Homi Bhabha (1994) destabilized the Saidian opposition between the imperial masters and the colonial subjects by focusing on paradoxically creative dimensions of colonialism. With his work, cultural hybridization has made for a popular subject of postcolonial studies. While Frantz Fanon and Edward Said focused on "the Manichean opposition" between the colonized and the colo­nizers, it is the enormous "grey zones" and "middle grounds" that have become the focus of postcolonial scholarship (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Finally, Gyan Prakash has noted the connection between Said's arguments and the tripartite world map that he inherited from the Cold War. "Even as we recognize that three worlds have collapsed into a single differentiated structure, the demand for imminent criti­cism remains relevant," wrote Prakash (1996: 199).

Among European powers, the Russian Empire was distinguished by its liminal location between west and east; by a composite struc­ture that was created of western and eastern elements; and by its self-reflective culture, which accounted for creative combinations of orientalism, occidentalism, and more. It is difficult to think about this historical phenomenon in terms of Platonic ideas of east and west. For many reasons, these ideas are awkward and difficult to handle. It would be better to imagine east and west as Heraclites' elements, which are free to mix in certain, though not in any, combinations. As elements, the west and the east sometimes need one another, like fire and air; sometimes displace one another, like water and fire; and sometimes - most frequently - coexist in complex, multilayered folds, pockets, and mixtures, like water and earth.

Following Said's footsteps, I will show that some of his protago­nists, major British authors, documented their Russian fantasies or memories in a way that was simultaneously orientalist and "non- traditional," i.e. deeply different from what Said saw as the norm of western writings about the "traditional East." I will look at Defoe, Kipling, and Balfour, and leave Conrad for a separate chapter. I do not mean that similar readings can be applied to all or many of the protagonists of Said's Orientalism. But these four authors are, without doubt, important. At the end of this chapter, I will explore one source of Said's remarkable omission of Russia from his analysis.

Robinson's Sables

Robinson Crusoe was the starting point for some of Said's crucial arguments. Re-reading Daniel Defoe's groundbreaking representa­tions of the western man in an eastern land, Said explored Crusoe's attitude toward money, travel, and solitude. Like many critics before him, Said ignored the second volume of Defoe's trilogy, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). These adventures brought Robinson much farther than his proverbial island. Covering thou­sands of miles, mostly by earth, he traveled to Madagascar, China, Tartary, and Siberia, to return to England by way of Archangel. This geographical experience was very different from what he found on no man's island, and he engaged in social adventures that were totally different from his experience with Friday. In Eurasia, he negotiated with savvy eastern traders, had conflicts with his ship­mates, lost Friday, decimated a native village, established a settled colony in Madagascar, failed as a colonial administrator, made a new friend, and became rich. Entering Siberia, he felt relief, but also disappointment:

As we came nearer to Europe we should find the country better peopled, and the people more civiliz'd; but I found myself mistaken in both, for we had yet the nation of the Tongueses to pass through . . . ; as they were conquered by the Muscovites, and entirely reduc'd, they were not so dangerous, but for rudeness of manners . . . no people in the world ever went beyond them. (Defoe 1925: 310)

Taking into account Robinson's previous adventures, this was no small criticism. The horrible Tunguses particularly impressed Robinson with their furs. "They are all clothed in skins of beasts, and their houses are built of the same." As we shall see shortly, Robinson's business vision did not fail him this time. In contrast, his geography was very shaky.

Much concerned, like other travelers of his time (Wolff 1994), with the boundary between Europe and Asia, he reported that this bound­ary stretched along the Enisey river, but some pages later transferred it thousands of miles farther west, to the Kama river. In Siberia, Robinson was also interested in comparative issues:

The Czar of Muscovy has taken to have cities . . . where his soldiers keep garrisons something like the stationary soldiers plac'd by the Romans in the remotest countries of their empire, some of which I had read particularly were plac'd in Britain. . . . Wherever we came, the garrisons and governor were Russians, and professed Christians, yet the inhabitants of the country were mere pagans sacrificing to idols, and . . . the most barbarous, except only that they did not eat human flesh, as our savages in America did. (Defoe 1925: 295)

In a un-Robinsonian way, he reported his findings to "the Muscovite governors" of Siberia, who said that it was none of their business, because if the Czar expected to convert his subjects, "it should be done by sending clergymen among them, not soldiers" (Defoe 1925: 311). They added, with more sincerity than Robinson expected, "that it was not so much the concern of their monarch to make the people

Christians as to make them subjects." He also learned that Siberia was the Russian place of exile, which did not surprise this Brit. When he befriended an exiled Russian prince there, he devised a subversive plan to smuggle him to England. This Russian Friday, however, declined the offer in sublime, Puritan words:

Here I am free from the temptation of returning to my former miserable greatness; there I am not sure that all the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury . . . may revive and take root. . . . Dear sir, let me remain in this blessed confinement, banish'd from the crimes of life, rather than purchase a show of freedom, at the expense of the liberty of my reason. (Defoe 1925: 323)

Dostoevsky's characters might have said the same thing in the same part of Siberia, but their final plea would not have been to preserve "reason." Touched by both the offer and its denial, Robinson and the prince exchanged gifts. The prince gave Robinson "a very fine present of sables, too much indeed for me to accept from a man in his circumstances, and I would have avoided them, but he would not be refus'd." Robinson gave the prince "a small present of tea, and two pieces of China damask, and four little wedges of Japan gold, which . . . were far short of the value of his sables." The prince accepted the tea and one piece of gold, "but would not take any more." The next day, the prince asked Robinson to take his only son to England. The deal was excellent: with his new Friday, Robinson obtained "six or seven horses, loaded with very rich furs, and which in the whole, amounted to a very great value" (Defoe 1925: 325). And so it happened.

Rich in realistic details, this part of The Farther Adventures sends a complex moral message. The indiscriminate picture of Siberian idolatry fits the perception of Robinson as an orientalizing Puritan traveler. His condemnation of the Tsar's indifference to his Christian mission reveals Defoe's understanding of the imperial burden. The whole picture justified Robinson's plot of cheating the Russian Tsar by smuggling his exiled subject to England. But it was not only Robinson's desperate longing for human contact, another feature of his pilgrimage, which motivated his unlimited affection toward the prince. Because of the generosity of the prince and the value of the furs, their exchange was unfair, a fact that Robinson felt deeply but did not try to correct. Two times in a row, Robinson financially benefited from this friendship. The exchange of gifts in which the western side gains fabulously and unilaterally was a regular ambition of colonial projects. But in The Farther Adventures, Robinson gained not because of his intellectual superiority over the native, but because of his moral inferiority. Evidently, Defoe designed the whole exchange in such a way that the exiled Russian prince appeared not only richer but also wiser and kinder than the traveling British merchant. Able to make a distinction between freedom and liberty in perfect English, this prince was also very enlightened, an admirable quality in com­parison to Robinson's limited skills. Thrown among barbaric people, the noble prince of a higher nature represented the embodiment of a particularly Russian kind of colonialism, in which the high and the low points of human existence are pushed to the extreme, beyond the westerners' expectations. This friend was a far cry from the first volume's Friday; maybe because of this, it was the prince's son, not the prince, who took Friday's place in Robinson's retinue.

Judging Robinson solely on the basis of the first volume of his travels, Said performed an erasure that has been typical of modern readings of Crusoe, who have presented Crusoe as the model and prototype of Puritan orientalism. As Melissa Free (2006) argues in her illuminating essay, this erasure was uncommon among the early readers of Defoe but became increasingly popular in the twentieth century. In her extraordinary statistics from more than 1,000 editions of Crusoe in English, Free demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, these editions usually consisted of just the first two or all three of the volumes, with only 4 percent containing the first volume alone. In the nineteenth century, the separate publications of the first volume increased only slightly. But after World War I, more than 75 percent of the editions of Crusoe consisted of the first volume only. The story, which resulted in more commerce than any colonial cargo, was sim­plified by abridgement. The fur-clad Russian prince was sacrificed in preference to the naked Friday. Robinson in Siberia was not oriental­ist enough, or rather not in the proper way, to deserve reading.

Kipling's Bear

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1889. But of course they have met myriad times and Kipling, though often misquoted, knew it welname = "note" "But there is neither East nor West. . . . When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!" (Kipling 1925: 231). By focusing on relations between the First World and the Third, post- colonial studies have too literally followed the initial line of Kipling's

Ballad and missed its deconstructive flow. However, in the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, which Kipling explored in Kim, three rather than two elements fight a sort of mili­tarized dialectics: England, India, and, in the background, vicious Russia. The Game pushed India to the west and Russia to the east, a complex geopolitics that Kipling situated in the continuum that spans and curves around the globe. An Irish boy and British spy in India, Kim works against the Russian penetration there in a spirit that is more reminiscent of the future Cold War rather than of India's struggle.

In a later poem, "Truce of the Bear" (1898), Kipling presented a pathetic beggar who tells the story of his fight with a horrible beast, "the Bear that stands like a Man." The fight, if there was any, took place 50 years earlier than the story, but the beggar keeps repeating it as the central event of his life. He describes the bear as "the

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monstrous, pleading thing." However, the bear is not unknown; the opposite is true: "I knew his times and his seasons, as he knew mine. . . .I knew his strength and cunning, as he knew mine." When he met this bear 50 years earlier, the hunter had pity on him and did not shoot. In response, the bear ripped his face away. Now, the former hunter asks for money in exchange for demonstrating his wounds. "Over and over the story, ending as he began: / 'There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!' " Though Russia is not mentioned in the poem, generations of readers have perceived this bear as the symbol of Russia, and the poem as a call to Britain to make no truce with this rival. In 1919, an author of the Atlantic Magazine praised Kipling for his "remarkable rightness." After the revolution in Russia, the wartime alliance seemed to her like a bad idea, a Truce of the Bear. To this author, "the Russians were behaving very much, and very vividly, like 'the bear that looks like a man.' " She testified to the fact that Kipling's Russophobia was unpopular before and during the war: "The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in these last years; and Kipling's laughter at that phenomenon must have been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right, it would prove them so remarkably wrong" (Gerould 1919).

But Kipling's construction is more subtle. While Matun, the nar­rator, "Eyeless, noseless, and lipless - toothless, broken of speech," does not look like a Man, Adam-zad, the bear, "Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer," does. This resemblance between the Bear and the Man repeats as the central line of the poem; they are like twins who are engaged in an eternal, open-ended fight. Once again, we need to return to the very start of the poem to realize that the narrator is not white; he is bandaged. "[H]e follows our white men in / Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin" (Kipling 1925: 271-3). The duel and the truce were struck between the Indian man and the Russian bear. As in Kim, the con­struction is triangular, not linear. Like Gogol's "The Nose," this poem turns into doubles what cannot possibly be similar: the whole and the part, the man and the beast, "less than one and double."

Throughout the age of empires, Britain increasingly saw its adver­sary in Russia. In the time of Kipling, both empires debated the pos­sibility of a Russian attack on India, which was alternatively perceived as revenge for the defeat in the Crimea and as a threat to British rule in Asia. First used by the Brits in 1840, the term "Great Game" referred to their civilizing mission in Central Asia, but the meaning shifted to the zero-sum game when Russia expanded into the region (Yapp 1987; Hopkirk 1996). In 1879, a certain A. Dekhnewallah published a pamphlet, The Great Russian Invasion of India, which described a future war between the two empires. Advancing through Afghanistan, Russian troops occupy the Punjab and Central prov­inces. Their attack is well prepared by the numerous spies who provoke mutiny among lower castes. British India is saved by an artillery officer, "a quiet man with large dreamy eyes," who with­draws the troops to Kashmir and organizes cunning attacks on the invaders. Finally, the British send navy expeditions into the Black Sea and the Baltic, forcing the Russians to purchase peace at the expense of giving up Afghanistan and Persia (Dekhnewallah 1879: 43, 66). The war of the future was imagined by analogy with the war of the past, the Crimean campaign.

"The Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in," stated Kipling in the amazing story, "The Man Who Was" (1889). A British regiment in north India hosts a certain Dirkovitch, "a Russian of the Russians, as he said." A Cossack officer and a journalist writing for a newspaper "with a name that was never twice the same," Dirkovitch is evidently a spy. But the Brits treat him with respect: he has done "rough work in Central Asia" and has seen more "help-yourself fighting than most men of his years." With his bad English, this Cossack tries to refresh the idea of the civilizing mission for the White Hussars:

He remained distressingly European through it all. . . . He would unburden himself by the hour on the glorious future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia when . . . the great mission of civilizing Asia should begin. That was unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old. You cannot reform a lady of many lovers. (Kipling 1952: 29)

Denying the orientals' ability to rule themselves as Brits do, the nar­rator, one of the White Hussars, holds no illusions about the Russian's sincerity: Dirkovitch knew the hopelessness of changing Asia "as well as any one else." The White Guards recognize this Russian in a racial way that is meaningful for them; although an Indian officer, their ally, cannot not join them at table and knows it, Dirkovitch is able to spend his evenings with the Brits; moreover, he proves his ability to drink more brandy than any of them. But suddenly, a weird figure appears in the living room: The Man Who Was, a miserable Afghan who speaks English and Russian. He turns out to be a former officer of this very regiment, whom the Russians captured in the Crimea and sent to Siberia; decades later, beaten and pathetic, he has found his way back to his regiment, "like a homing pigeon." He cringes before the Cossack who espouses an unclear threat: "He was just one little - oh, so little - accident, that no one remembered. Now he is That. So will you be, brother-soldiers so brave - so will you. But you will never come back." The Man Who Was dies three days later. As Dirkovitch departs, the smartest of his British friends murmurs, "A terrible spree there's sure to be when he comes back again." The theme of coming back is central for the story. British troops in India were expecting the return of the experience of the Crimean War. Having read the story to the end, we inevitably go back to the beginning:

Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of Western peoples, instead of the most westerly of Eastern, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up next. (Kipling 1952: 28)[3]

Kipling's contemporary, George Nathaniel Curzon, visited Russia before his appointment as Vice-Roy of India (1898-1905). In his first book, which happened to be his Russian travelogue, he wrote, "Upon no question there is greater conflict of opinion in England than Russia's alleged designs upon India." Based on his experience of traveling to Russia, he felt this split internally: "Every Englishman enters Russia as a Russophobe and leaves it a Russofile" (Curzon 1889: 11, 20). No doubt an overgeneralization, this early version of a "from Russia with love" story speaks volumes about the British attitude toward Russia. Having entered and left Russia, Curzon was still anxious about the Russian threat: "Russia is as much compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun," he wrote. But on the other hand, the Russian advance in Asia would just be "a con­quest of Orientals by Orientals" and therefore acceptable (Curzon 1889: 319, 372). As Foreign Secretary (1919-24), Curzon drew a line between revolutionary Russia and the newly independent Poland, which many decades later materialized as the border of the European Union. For all practical purposes, the Curzon line is still dividing the world into the west and the east.

To the revolution in Russia, Kipling responded with the poem, "Russia to the Pacifists." His unexpected mourning for the Russian Empire reflected his anxiety that the distant tragedy would repeat at home: "So do we bury a Nation dead / And who shall be next to fall?" It turned out to be another version of the boomerang story: "We go to dig a nation's grave as great as England was" (Kipling 1925: 274-5).

Balfour's Declaration

According to Said, orientalism was a form of thought and of action, and the two were cyclically connected. The politics created the knowl­edge, which, in its own turn, guided the behavior of the colonizers and directed their scholarship. One of Said's initial examples was the ideas and policies of the early twentieth-century British statesman Arthur James Balfour, who in 1917 laid the foundation for the Jewish migration to Palestine. Said declared that Balfour's "argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was clear. . . . There were Westerners, and there were Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated." The double doctrine of western power and orientalist knowledge was based on the "absolute demarcation between East and West." These two categories, of east and west, were "both the starting and the end points of analysis." Their "polar distinction," "binary opposition," or "radical difference" secured the "streamline and effective" operations that Said ascribes to Balfour's type of ori­entalism. In Balfour's mind "the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western"; Said calls it "to polarize the distinction." To Balfour, " ' Orientals' for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence" (Said 1978: 36-45).

A Platonic essence cannot change, expand, or polarize. It cannot merge with other essences. Finally, it cannot be aware of itself. No doubt, Balfour deserved much of this criticism. In 1917, he told his colleagues in the Cabinet that since "East is East and West is West," they should not use the idea of self-governance when they are talking about places like India. Even in the west, said Balfour, parliamentary institutions had rarely been a great success, "except among the English-speaking people." Curzon found this statement, which could have come straight from an ironical Kipling story, "very reactionary" (Gilmour 1994: 485). Responding to the events that were triggered by the revolution in Russia, Balfour projected his orientalism not only onto Indians and Arabs, but onto Jews as well, especially Russian Jews. When Balfour met the aspiring Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1906, he asked this Belarusian Jew whether his people would go to Uganda rather than to Palestine. Weizmann responded with a question: "Mr Balfour, supposing I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" Balfour said, "But Dr Weizmann, we have London." "That is true," Weizmann said, "but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh." Instead of questioning this concept of "we," Balfour asked, "Are there many Jews who think like you?" To this Weizmann said, "I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves" (Weizmann 1949: 144).

Meeting in Manchester, the statesman and the immigrant discussed oriental places such as Uganda, Palestine, and the Pale. Born in the village of Motol, near Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, Weizmann seemed exotic to Balfour. Of course, Balfour knew how to talk to orientals and his questions were exacting; but Weizmann also knew his game. He conversed with Balfour not just as a member of a foreign tribe, but as a representative of a people who were unknown and unseen, a people who could not speak for themselves. A decade later, as Foreign Secretary, Balfour passed Weizmann his famous Declaration that conveyed British "sympathy" for Zionist aspirations and established "a national home" for the Jews in Palestine. It was not the state, though. Often criticized and rarely understood, Balfour was pursuing the policy by analogy: the Russian Pale of settlement was not a state, either. The stateless Jews from the old, by then destroyed, Pale of the Russian Empire were moving to the newly drawn Pale of the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration was signed on November 2, 1917, five days before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It had a double purpose, to create a British protectorate for Jews in Palestine and to discharge the explosive situation in Russia, where the Bolsheviks, many of them Jews, were contemplating a separate peace with the Germans.

It so happened that Weizmann became a dear friend of Balfour, a distant analogue of Robinson's Russian prince. Balfour's practices and theories were essentialist, but they changed over the decades. His "orientals" included Weizmann from Pinsk and the Mufti of Jerusalem, both of whom were important for British politics in Palestine. British policies toward the east, including Eastern Europe, also changed dramatically. Dividing the vastly different orientals and mediating between them in the name of the Empire, Balfour's east was not really a world of Platonic essences. It was, rather, a Wittgensteinian constellation of images, people, and places that had little in common but their perceived distance from Trinity College, Cambridge, where Balfour received his Law degree.

If for Kipling, Russia was a mythical enemy that had always threat­ened but never penetrated his India, Joseph Conrad was still living after this event actually happened to his Poland. Russian colonization was the site of the catastrophe, accomplished or anticipated - the crime of partition, the truce of the bear. I find it amazing that Edward Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) all but ignored Conrad's tortured relation to the Russian Empire, which was central both to his fiction and to his autobiography(see Chapter 11). An enthralled critic of Balfour and Curzon, Kipling and Conrad, Said took no notice of their obsessions with Russia. By doing so, he reduced their multipolar worldliness to the one-dimensional concept of traditional orientalism.

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