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An Uncle's Lesson
There was no Second World in Said's universe. One of the reasons becomes clear from his memoirs, which present an unexpectedly lonely, apolitical portrait of his youth. Protected from real life by the wealth of his father and the warmth of his mother, Edward was awakened by the Egyptian revolution of 1952. As a result of the coup, Edward's father lost a large part of his business, and his mother became an ardent supporter of the militant and increasingly pro- Soviet leader of the revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Edward, then aged 17, became involved in the family debates, the Cold War in miniature. His sympathies were with his Nasserite mother, though he sometimes disagreed with her "socialist pan-Arabism" (Said 1999: 264). The opposite pole, however, was embodied not by his father who was busy restoring his business, but by a relative, Charles Malik, the husband of an aunt.
A philosopher who studied with Heidegger and a statesman who wrote the Declaration of Human Rights together with Eleanor
Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Edward Said could have been among these children.
Roosevelt, Malik was an outstanding figure. The Lebanese Ambassador to the US, he also served as the country's Foreign Minister and later, at the end of the 1950s, as President of the United Nations General Assembly. "Polarizing" and "charismatic," as Said depicted him, but also cosmopolitan and visionary, Malik was a true Cold War warrior. Among many subjects of his speeches and pamphlets, the most salient subject was anti-communism.
The young Edward Said was initially attracted to his famous relative, but later found him "troubling." Ascribing to the Soviet Union "the missionary fervor and the imperialist vision," Malik warned the free world of the threat of enslavement. However, when in 1960 he shared a podium with the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, Malik chose to espouse his dream of the peaceful disintegration of communism from within. He saw "infinite possibilities, short of war," to help this happen (Teller and Malik 1960). He hated "neutralism" and eagerly operated with the concepts of west and east.
Devoting pages to the philosophical analysis of their relations, he saw two forces, Soviet Communism and Islam, occupying two "intermediary" and "inauthentic" positions between east and west. A Lebanese Christian, Malik distrusted them both, but his passions were focused on the Soviets. "Communism is almost infinitely resourceful in poisoning any normal relationship between East and West," wrote Malik (1953) during the Egyptian revolution. Around this time, Said learned from Malik "about the clash of civilizations, the war between West and East, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions." Said's distrust is clear in these words, but the intensity and longevity of his struggle against Malik's influence needed another passage: "I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life." For the last three decades, wrote Said in 1999, he was still living through Malik's "lesson," analyzing it "over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment" (Said 1999: 264-5).
For many Third World intellectuals, the Soviet Union was an inspiration and a model; for some, it was also a source of support. The most notable thinkers of the radical Left took part in the emancipation efforts that were led, and sometimes manipulated, by the Soviet Union. The fate of the American John Reed, a participant of the Bolshevik Revolution who died in 1920 in Moscow after taking part in the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, illustrates this early twentieth-century convergence between communism and anti- imperialism. The lives and works of Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Jean-Paul Sartre give further, intellectually more significant, examples. But as the Soviet Union shaped itself into a major imperialist power that competed with other global powers, the free- minded Marxist-leaning intellectuals found themselves deprived of their mental tools. There is a disturbing split between the ways in which many twentieth-century thinkers understood two major developments of the period, decolonization and the collapse of the imperialist order on the one hand, and the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist order, on the other.
Said's oeuvre features the same partial worldliness, which omits the Second World as a nuisance. If, for those who believed in "modernization theory," the Second World did not seem much different from the Third World because both were just steps in the modernization process that led to the First World, then postcolonial critics performed the opposite operation. In their minds, the Second World was not much different from the First World because they both failed to support the Third World. This indifference calcified after fellow-travelers of the Soviet regime watched its collapse, with their hopes betrayed and their respect having turned to contempt. However, Said was never a Soviet fellow-traveler. His memories of his early debates with his mother, the supporter of Nasser, could signal his lifelong disavowal of the pro-Soviet ideas that were popular in his circle. He was trying to find his own, creative way, one that would ignore Nasser and Malik alike. But then not only the Nasserian regime but the Soviet Union also collapsed. Were Malik still alive in 1991, he could have celebrated the triumph of his prediction about the non-violent demise of the socialist system from within. Said had nothing to say about this and subsequent events in the Second World; to comment on them would have amounted to agreeing with his uncle.
However, in one of his last books, Said experimented with a closer look at Eastern Europe. In
Said's wonderful book on Freud ends in the most unexpected way, with a tribute to Isaac Deutscher, "a non-Jewish Jew," a Polish Trotskyite who became a British critic of both Stalinism and Zionism. Freud chose Moses, Said chose Deutscher: two non-Zionist Jews, non-Western Europeans, betrayed revolutionaries, adopted founders. It was an extraordinary choice that showed Said's late, mature interest in the Second World.
Part II
Writing from Scratch
Chasing Rurik
Ascribed to a twelfth-century monk, Nestor, the
Inviting Leviathan
In 1818, having read what was the newest version of the Rurik story, General Mikhail Orlov, a hero of the war with Napoleon and a future rebel and exile, wrote to a friend:
I am reading Karamzin. His first volume is not to my liking. . . . Why no passion for the Fatherland? Why does he want to be an impassionate cosmopolite rather than a citizen? . . . Why does he say that Rurik was a foreigner? That Varangians were not Slavs? What does he find
praiseworthy in the call to the foreigner to take the seat of Novgorod?
(Cited in Maiofis 2008: 344)
Like the building of the Russian Empire, the writing of its history was an international project, frequently contested by the emerging Russian nationalism. Nationalisms embodied themselves in history books as well as in novels and newspapers. Part of "print capitalism" but perceived as truth rather than fiction, history books shaped the body of the nation despite the permanent revisions of them and contradictions among them (Anderson 1991; Hroch 1985). Generations of Russians read about Rurik while Russia was fighting with its enemies. In times of peace, they pursued historical studies because of their patriotic desire to learn more about their country. In their classes or textbooks, there was no place to start but with Rurik the Varangian. Who was he, who were they? The ethnicity of Rurik was discussed fervently, while other aspects of his story were largely ignored.
Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov,
The first Russian author to publish the
Tatishchev's life and work were parallel to those of his French contemporary, a royal historian Henri de Boulainvilliers, who received a focused attention from both Arendt (1970) and Foucault (2003). Like Boulainvilliers, Tatishchev lived in a time of wars and served his monarch in many ways, including history writing. Three major wars between Sweden and Russia punctuated his lifetime, one a failure and two ending in Russian victories. During the truce, Tatishchev went for two years to Sweden, where he explored the mining industry and carried out intelligence work. Tatishchev's rule in the Urals, where he had to enserf the local peasants to make them work in his factories, was notoriously violent. Like Boulainvilliers, who is credited with the scholarly elaboration of the right of conquest, Tatishchev liked the idea that the Russian state was founded by conquest. However, the idea that the conquerors were the ancestors of Russia's current enemy made him uncomfortable: "The arrival of Rurik with his Varangians humiliated the kinship and language of Slavs" (Tatishchev 1994: 1/344). Some consolation was found in the idea that the incoming Vikings were all male and therefore, their descendants were "quickly" Slavonized. It might be true with the Rurikides but the Romanovs invariably married into the Baltic peoples, undoing the previous Russification. After much doubt, Tatishchev concluded that the Vikings came to northern Russia from Finland rather than Sweden. Since parts of Finland had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1721 and again in 1743, locating Rurik's point of departure in Finland domesticated him into a Russian subject. In response, Tatishchev's nemesis, the German historian August Schlozer who worked in St. Petersburg and Gottingen, said plainly but a little maliciously that the Varangians were Swedes (1809: 2/430).
For Russian readers of the
In the early nineteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin found a semantic solution to the question of the Varangians in calling them Normans. An early source identified visitors to Constantinople, who came from "Rus," as the Normans (Vasil'ev 1946; Franklin and Shepard 1996). More importantly, by equating the Varangians with the Normans, Karamzin equated Russians with other Europeans who had also been dominated by the Normans in the past. A competing school of thought called itself "anti-Normanist." Schlozer wrote, early and prophetically:
I do not know of another example among the educated nations in which the science of national history would have such a strange pace. Everywhere it has been moving ahead .. . but here [in Russia] it has been returning to the very start, and more than once. (Schlozer 1809: 2/391)
Tatishchev and the Amazons
But the story of Rurik is gentle, even "idyllic" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/140). It does read as if the Vikings and the Slavic-Finnish tribes struck some kind of voluntary agreement. One part said to another, come and reign over us. The other part surely asked, is your land rich enough? But Rurik is a foreigner, someone in the crowd must have said. Retelling the story for the first time, Tatishchev had to believe that, first, in order to establish civil peace, a tribe needs a sovereign, and second, that it does not really matter where this sovereign comes from: from within the tribe or from the outside. While the former idea was espoused by Thomas Hobbes and in the eighteenth century had become the mainstream philosophical wisdom, the latter was unusual.
For Tatishchev as much as for us (or even more so), the
In Russia as in German lands in the late eighteenth century, debates on Pufendorf provided shelter for discussions of Hobbes (Kempe 2007). This is how Pufendorf rendered the central idea of
Whilst I voluntarily subject myself to the prince, I promise obedience and engage his protection; on the other hand, the prince who receives me as a subject, promiseth his protection, and engageth my obedience. . . . They who create a sovereign, therefore, at the same time promise whatever the nature of subjection requires. . . . And what can we call this but the entering into covenant? (Pufendorf 2002: 595)
This is a version of Hobbes's argument that the sovereign's violence is justified because, in its absence, the unruly subjects would foment even greater violence. In Pufendorf, this idea acquires an active, dramatized form. Subjects "create a sovereign" by exchanging "promises" and negotiating these promises
The conquistador must . . . move forward from the
In a theoretical chapter of his
Tatishchev began his own political philosophy not with Hobbes's "war of all against all," which is a collective experience, but with the idea of a solitary man. By himself, man is helpless; he cannot obtain "pleasure, peace, or profit." Therefore, he creates civil unions "naturally." The first exemplary union is marriage. It is based on a free choice but after the parts sign a contract, they cannot break it and each part can force the other to follow the contract. The same is true of the state, said Tatishchev. In the family, men "naturally" dominate women and children; this is also the foundation of a monarchy, because "the monarch is the father and his subjects are children" (1994: 1/359).
In Tatishchev, a patriarchal philosophy coexisted with a fantastic history. He claimed that the Slavs originated from the Amazons, the female warriors whom Herodotus connected to the Scythians. Tatishchev argued that in ancient times, the Amazons came from Africa to the banks of the Volga and there became the Slavic tribes. He attributed this discovery to Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Novgorod and one of the closest associates of Peter I, and gave a specific date, 1724, when Feofan supposedly presented this idea to Peter I. These amazing Amazons, the great-grandmothers of Russians, played a peculiar role in Tatishchev's historical imagination. In line with his idea of marriage as the paradigm for contract relations, he assumed the contract between the Vikings and the Slavs was a marriage in which the Vikings played the masculine role and the Slavs the feminine role. That is why the Russians, having originated from the Amazons and the Vikings, were good warriors. Later, Catherine the Great created a cult of Amazons that included an "Amazon" outfit, an "Amazon" way of riding horseback and an "Amazon" regiment of female warriors, the wives of local gentry who greeted Catherine in the Crimea (Zorin 2001; Proskurina 2006). Catherine even told Diderot that in St. Petersburg she was missing "the first Russians," the Varangians (Diderot 1992: 123).
An elaborate speculation on the Amazons and the marriage model of the state helped Tatishchev to reconcile Rurik with Hobbes and Pufendorf. Famously, Hobbes distinguished between two types of Commonwealth, by Institution and by Acquisition. The former comes from a voluntary agreement among the insiders, the latter is imposed by force of war onto the outsiders. Both are based on fear, and the rights of sovereignty are the same in both. The terror of an occupation by foreigners helped Hobbes to explain the horrifying methods of the sovereign power. At the same time, this equation allowed him to neutralize the legacy of the Norman Conquest, which was still significant in the England of his time. "Leviathan's invisible adversary is the Conquest," wrote Foucault (2003: 98). Tatishchev knew the logic of
Schlozer was skeptical about this peaceful picture. Asking himself and the reader what the Russian north looked like in the year 800, he relied on the colonial experience that his contemporaries obtained overseas. It was "a little bit like Siberia, California, Madagascar," said Schlozer; "the Enlightenment that the Normans brought to the Russian desert was not better than what the Cossacks brought to the Kamchadals some 120 years ago" (Schlozer 1809: 1/419-20; 2/180; Miliukov 2006: 142). From reports by Georg Wilhelm Steller, who explored Kamchatka in 1740, Schlozer knew that the Russian conquest was one of the bloodiest in colonial history. In just 40 years the population of the vast land had shrunk to one-fifteenth of what it was before the Russians arrived. Foreign to Russian nationalist sentiment, Schlozer applied the idea of colonization to the very origins of Russian history. Russia was an exotic, deserted land that was colonized by the Vikings.
Remembered in Russia mainly as Normanists, Schlozer and his one-time patron, Gerhard Friedrich Muller, were also the founders of the discipline that has become known as ethnology. The new ethnological discourse came out of the clash between the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and the actual diversity of peoples of the Russian Empire, which resonated with the diversity and desolation of German lands after the peace of Westphalia (Vermeulen 2006, 2008). Later, two Prussians, Kant and Herder, ignored the Russian- based contributions of Muller and Schlozer. Though Herder's philosophical writings defined the future of anthropology, in Russia an influential trend in history, classical studies, and education drew its roots from "the great Schlozer." Preparing his ill-fated academic career as a professor of history, in 1832 Gogol wrote a fascinating essay, "Schlozer, Muller, and Herder," which portrayed these three as "the great architects of universal history." Attributing to Schlozer the gift of throwing lightning bolts, Gogol preferred him to the other two, and to Kant as welname = "note"
Schlozer was the first to feel history as one great whole. . . . His writing was like the lightning that illuminates objects almost at once. . . . He destroyed his enemies with one word of thunder. . . . Schlozer's genius had to be in opposition. . . . Him, rather than Kant, it is fair to call all-destructive. (Gogol 1984: 6/88-9)
After the end of Seven Years War (see Chapter 9), Schlozer returned to Germany. He developed "universal history" and social statistics in Gottingen; he was also a prolific journalist, one of the creators of the pan-German public sphere. He wrote
Within
Uvarov and the Black Athena
In 1812, Sergei Uvarov, a career official as well as a self-trained classicist, applied the concept of colonization to the emergence of ancient Greece:
It is probable that, of all the European countries, Greece was the first peopled by Asiatic colonies. . . . We know that Greece, peopled by Asian colonists, was subjugated in turn by races of men different among themselves, but of one common origin. These new colonies brought with them the elements of their religious worship. . . . The Egyptian and Phoenician colonies imported into Greece, with their religious modes of faith, their languages and their traditions. (Uvarov 1817: 73-4)
Uvarov had studied in Gottingen with Schlozer in 1801-3. The idea that ancient Greece produced myriads of Mediterranean colonies had been well established in classicist scholarship. However, Uvarov made a deeper and more radical claim, that ancient Greece was itself the result of colonization. Two oriental peoples, Egyptians and Phoenicians, invaded Greek lands in several waves and mixed with the local population, which Uvarov identified with the Pelasgians. He also learned from Schlozer, who was the first to describe the Semitic language family, that Egyptians and Phoenicians were "of one common origin." To name these processes, Uvarov used the term "colonization" extensively and with no sign of hesitation or novelty. He saw the analogy between the colonial situation that he described as the emergence of Greece, and the colonial situation that Schlozer described as the emergence of Russia; recent studies also indicate this analogy between Hellenistic and Russian colonization (Malkin 2004). Under Uvarov's influence, Schlozer's historiography became mainstream reading in the empire. In 1804, Alexander I ennobled Schlozer and gave him a coat of arms with Nestor, the legendary author of the
Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov between an Oriental tablecloth and a Classical column. Portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815), in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Later, Uvarov published a proposal for the setting up of an Academy of Asian Studies in St. Petersburg (Whittaker 1984; Maiofis 2008). "It is to Asia that we owe the foundations of the great edifice of human civilization," wrote Uvarov (1810); studying and enlightening continental Asia is Russia's task, its civilizing mission. The German linguist Julius Klaproth, who had just returned from a trip to Mongolia and the Caucasus, helped Uvarov in this venture (Benes 2004). In 1932, the Soviet scholar and former Orthodox priest, Sergei Durylin, interpreted Uvarov's project as if he had just read Foucault: "With Napoleon or against Napoleon, with England or against England, Russia had to know its own and the neighboring East in order to reign over it: this is the idea of the Asian Academy" (Durylin 1932: 191). Forging an illustrious career, Uvarov became President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1818), an organizer of St. Petersburg Imperial University (1819), and Minister of the People's Enlightenment (1833-49). Seeing his role as the promotion of the ancient languages and classical education, he described Greece using the historical concepts that he had acquired in Russia and understood Russia in terms that he had learned from classical scholarship. Colonized and colonizing, both countries had much to share.
Uvarov's ideas matured in the international Romantic circles that - as Edward Said (1978: 98) told us with irony - were fascinated with "nations, races, minds, and peoples as things one could talk about passionately - in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder." In 1813, when Russian troops were fighting all over Europe, Uvarov composed a plan for perpetual peace. Referring to Hobbes, the abbe de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant, whose projects of perpetual peace he knew but deemed outdated, Uvarov singled out one new idea that could provide a purpose for the postwar world. The idea was the colonization of the east, a sublime project that would keep the victors in business well after the war. Nations perform their noblest deeds after long and bloody conflicts, declared Uvarov. The war with Napoleon was large and its outcome, peace, would be proportional. Uvarov's Eurocentric project amounted to a project of colonization so large that it would be proper to call it, globalization. "The world is still spacious. . . . One half of the earth consists of deserts, of wild lands and . . . of barbarian societies. Powerful states will create a new world," wrote Uvarov (cited in Maiofis 2008: 78).
An alliance between two empires, the Russian and the British, was crucial for this project of global imperialism. But Great Britain suspected Alexander I of plans to create a world empire, declined to take part in the Holy Alliance of 1815, and prevented Russia from taking Greece from the Ottomans. Uvarov's idea of perpetual peace and his historical analogy between Russia and Greece became dated. In his correspondence with the highest authority among his contemporaries, Goethe, Uvarov reformulated the role of Russia as "the new Egypt" rather than Greece - not the "center" of the modern world but rather the "bridge" between its two separate halves, the east and the west. Like a bridge, Egyptians brought Asian culture to Greece and Europe; Russia should play the same role between Europe and Asia (Durylin 1932: 202). Three worlds were clearly on Uvarov's map, - the First World, Europe; the Third World, Asia; and the Second World, Russia. The new Egypt, Russia, would bring civilization to Asia in the same way as historical Egypt had brought it to Greece.
Beginning in 1987, the Sinologist Martin Bernal published several volumes of a controversial work that argued essentially the same thesis that had been proposed by Uvarov in 1812. Bernal's historical argument stated that the land of Greece had indeed been colonized by the Egyptians and Phoenicians and that the mixing of these peoples with the Pelasgians gave birth to ancient Greek civilization. This late twentieth-century study employed the same terminology of colonization that Uvarov had used much earlier. In the light of Bernal's his- toriographical argument, his proximity to Uvarov is not that surprising. Until about 1800, European classicists shared the belief in the eastern roots of Greece, asserts Bernal. Then, some scholars realized that this genealogy made Greeks the descendants of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, i.e. the Africans and the Semites. Because of the growing racism of the pan-European intellectual elite, a new era started that Bernal described as the rise of India and the fall of Egypt. Denying the idea of the black and Semitic Athena, historians and linguists invented the Indo-Europeans.
Bernal attributed this early nineteenth-century revisionism to Gottingen's circle of the anti-Semitic Semitologist Johann David Michaelis, who proposed the colonization of the sugar islands in the Caribbean by the deported European Jews (Hess 2000). While Michaelis's student and Uvarov's teacher, Schlozer, was the first to describe the Semitic language family, Uvarov's one-time assistant, Klaproth, was instrumental in the construction of the Indo-German language family (Benes 2004). Schlegel and the Parisian orientalists soon took up the fateful contrast between the Semites and Aryans. Connected to all of them but unable or uneager to choose between their positions, Uvarov synthesized them in his book on the mysteries of Eleusis. Supplementing the idea of the Semitic colonization of Greece, Uvarov identified some inscriptions that were connected with the mysterious Eleusis as sacral Sanskrit words, such as the famous Om. One illustration in the book, which was created by Uvarov's friend Aleksei Olenin, then Russia's Secretary of State, showed the Greek goddess, Ceres/Demeter sitting on a pedestal that featured the images of Indian and Egyptian gods and holding a parchment bearing mystical words in Greek. It was a wonderfully inclusive image; as a historian, Uvarov was more tolerant than he was as a bureaucrat. He chose the epigraph to this book from Virgil (Eclog. III): "Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites" - "Tis not for us to end such great disputes."
Origin is Destiny
Figure 5: Demeter-Ceres, a Greek-Roman Goddess, sits on a stone which exhibits on one side the Indian gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, and, on the other, the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The inscriptions say "Demeter" and "Homer."
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Being a colony means having a sovereign abroad. But both Russia and ancient Greece were different; at different stages of their history they were both colonized and colonizing. The potential of this system of similarities and differences was realized while Uvarov combined his duties as Minister of the Enlightenment and President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Working in Uvarov's spirit of enlightened, even utilitarian, monarchism, the writer Nikolai Karamzin supported the Hobbesian idea that the unruly Slavs created an autocratic regime to tame themselves. Internal conflicts and long-term misery revealed for the Slavs "the danger and the harm of the ruleof the people"; as a result, they acquired a "unanimous belief in the value of Autocracy." But taking the next step, Karamzin contrasted the origins of Russia with other processes of state-building: "Everywhere else Autocracy was introduced by the sword of the strong or the cunning of the ambitious. . . . In Russia, Autocracy was founded with the general consensus of the citizenry: this is what our
The history of any state is nothing but the development of its foundational event. . . . The beginning of the state is the most important part of . . . its history and it defines its fate for ever and ever. It is in the beginning that we need to find the difference of Russian history from any other, Western and Eastern histories. (Pogodin 1846: 2)
Origin and History are clearly different and the former overdeter- mines the latter.[4] For Pogodin, the invitation to Rurik, "to come and rule over us," was not a one-time event, as the
Adjusting Rurik's story and creating a theory of Origin, Pogodin centralized his own domain, Russian history, around the concept of colonization by consent. His idea of the "loving deal" responded to the colonial doctrine of his boss Uvarov. In 1818, when Pogodin was a student, Uvarov formulated the idea that remained central for his Enlightenment and orientalist initiatives:
Hegemony cannot be established or kept only by the sword. . . . Conquest with no respect for humanity, without the new and better laws, without correcting the condition of the defeated, is a futile and bloody dream. Gaining victories by the enlightenment, taming minds by the humble spirit of religion, by the spread of arts and sciences, by education and the prosperity of the defeated - this is the only method of conquest that could be stabilized for eternity. (Maiofis 2008: 281)
If this project did not sound realistic, Rurik's example could make it digestible. After all the blood spilled in their internal and external endeavors, the statesmen of the post-Napoleonic Restoration wished to reign over the hearts and minds of their subjects. Increasingly conservative, Uvarov coined the triple slogan of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality," which the Romanovs preached and practiced until 1917 (Riasanovsky 1959; Zorin 1997). But Uvarov was also attentive toward religious minorities, such as the Jews, expressing his hope early in 1836 for "the moral and intellectual rapprochement of the Jews and Christian society" (Stanislawski 1983: 68). Sergei Soloviev, who became a professor of history under Uvarov, quipped that his boss worshiped Orthodoxy though he did not believe in Christ, preached Autocracy though he was a "liberal," and called for Nationality though he had read "not a single Russian book" (Soloviev 1983: 268). The latter was definitely an exaggeration.
Under Uvarov, Russian historians became increasingly professional. They felt an obligation to write and teach Russian history in a worldly, comparative context that displaced bizarre and unique events, such as the story of Rurik, to the margins of scholarship. This perspective did not prevent their histories from evolving into imperial narratives of the steady, irresistible growth of Russian power. But first, they had to deal with Rurik, who opened their courses. The founding father of modern Russian history, Sergei Soloviev, closed the circle by connecting Rurik with Peter the Great and situating Rurik's arrival at the site of St. Petersburg: "The location of the great waterway that connects Europe and Asia determined the foundation of St. Petersburg: here in the ninth century the first half of Russian history started, here in the eighteenth century its second half began" (1988: 1/60). But his great student, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, retold the story of the Varangians with noticeable irritation:
What is this but not a stereotypical formula of the law-abiding power that rises out of a contract, a theory very old, but always re-emerging . . . ? The tale of the Call to the Princes, as it is told in the
With the irony that he sometimes smuggled into his writings, Kliuchevsky attributed the contract theory of political power to the Orthodox monks of the twelfth century. He knew that this was an anachronistic hypothesis. Was it Nestor who adjusted his stories for the schoolchildren? The famous historian questioned this part of the
To Colonize Oneself
The Romantic and then the Soviet poets sang of the warmth and beauty of the Russian land. But historians of Russia expressed deep insecurity about the Russian environment, both natural and social. Russian nature was not the mother for Russians, but the stepmother, said Sergei Soloviev (1988: 7/8-9). During the crisis of the seventeenth century, Muscovites felt alien in their own state, "as if they were accidental and temporary dwellers in someone else's house," wrote Vasilii Kliuchevsky (1956: 3/52). Surprisingly, this historian also applied the same oxymoronic trope, homesickness at home, to a man of the eighteenth century, Peter I: he was "a guest in his own home" (1956: 4/31). Strikingly, the same author also applied the same trope to a typical early-nineteenth-century noble who, "strolling with Voltaire's book somewhere in his own village," felt himself "an alien among his own kind" (1956: 5/183). In his wonderful essay on Pushkin's
"Why did God make me a stranger and an outcast in mine own house?" wrote the renowned African American intellectual, W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 (Washington et al. 1965: 214). Postcolonial theorists have also speculated about this experience of being "strangers to ourselves" (Kristeva 1991). "The 'unhomely' is a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition," states Bhabha (1994: 13). In the nineteenth century, the pioneers of Russian historiography found their own formulas for the same intuition.
Soloviev and the Frontier
Having visited Russia in 1843, August von Haxthausen wrote that this country was involved not in a colonial expansion but, rather, in an "internal colonization," which was "the most important subject of the whole internal politics and economy of this Empire" (1856: 2/76). Unlike the other Russian discoveries of this Prussian official, this one failed to attract public attention. However, mid-nineteenth- century agricultural experts eagerly used the concept of colonization
The mid- and late nineteenth century was the moment of imperial expansion on a large scale (Arendt 1970). Taking its part in the conquest of America, the Great Game in Asia, and even the scramble for Africa, the Russian Empire was no less concerned about its vast hinterland. Having appropriated imperialist language, it needed to adjust the overseas concept of colonization to its terrestrial, provincial realms. The Moscow historian, Sergei Soloviev, made the conceptual breakthrough. Drawing his academic genealogy directly from Schlozer, he was engaged in a fierce polemics with Khomiakov and his Slavophile followers, whom he deemed "an anti-historical school" (see Chapter 1). He appropriated Khomiakov's critical notion of Russia as a colony, but gave it an interpretation that was deeper both historically and logically. Applying the discourse of colonization to pre-Petrine Russia, Soloviev rejected the very difference between the colonizers and the colonized: "Russia was a vast, virgin country, which was waiting to be populated, waiting for its history to begin: therefore ancient Russian history is the history of a country that colonizes itself" (1988: 2/631).
Soloviev formulated this astonishing dictum in his survey of Russia's ancient history. If there is no point in differentiating between the subject and the object of Russia's colonization, then let us avoid doing so. Soloviev gave a dynamic depiction of the concerns of a self-colonized country:
To populate as soon as possible, to call people from everywhere to come to empty places, to tempt them with various benefits; to leave a place for newer, better lands, for the most profitable conditions, for an edge that is quiet and peaceful; on the other hand, to cling to the people, to bring them back, to force others not to accept them - these are the important concerns of a country that colonizes itself. (1988: 2/631)
For a colonial mind, there is no greater distance in the world than that between the metropolitan land and its colony. How can a country colonize itself? Soloviev knew the problem and emphasized it:
This country [Russia] was not a colony that was separated from the metropolitan land by oceans: the heart of the state's life was situated in this very country. . . . While the needs and functions of the state were increasing, the country did not lose her self-colonizing character. (1988: 2/631)
In Russian, the reflexive form that Soloviev used, "to colonize itself," is as unusual as it is in English. In the original even more than in the translation, this formula sounds dynamic, even forceful, and paradoxical. But Soloviev and his disciples were consistent in the use of this verbal form. Going into detail in his multiple volumes, Soloviev explained that the direction of Russia's self-colonization was coherent, from the south-west to the north-east, from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Dnieper. Going north, the ancient Russian tribes went to Novgorod and to the coast of the White Sea. Going east, they colonized the upper Volga and the neighborhood of Moscow. There they established the Russian state, but the direction of colonization remained the same, to the east and all the way to Siberia. Importantly, Soloviev did not apply the idea of "Russia colonizing itself" to the history that he perceived as modern. In his later volumes that described the "new" Russian history as opposed to the "ancient," he did not use the term "colonization."
In a pioneering essay, Mark Bassin (1993) compared Soloviev's idea of Russia's "colonization of itself" with Frederick J. Turner's concept of the American "frontier." There are many resemblances and differences between these two concepts, both of them crucial to the histories of Russia and America. Like the American frontier, the external line of Russia's colonization was uncertain, diffuse, and constantly moving. As in America, this line was centrally important for the development of Russian imperial culture. Persecuted religious minorities were equally important in the American and Russian frontiers (Turner 1920; Etkind 1998; Breyfogle 2005). However, there are also significant differences between Turner's and Soloviev's concepts.
Turner explored the modern developments on the frontier, while Soloviev restricted his use of the concept of Russia's self-colonization to its "ancient," i.e. early medieval, history. This difference is not as serious as it sounds because there is nothing in the concept of colonization that prevents using it for the modern Russian period; indeed, as we will see shortly, Kliuchevsky made this move, but Soloviev did not. While Turner focused on the characteristic culture of the western frontier and explored the mechanisms of its impact on the eastern states, Soloviev did not produce a comparable portrait of the external line of colonization. However, historians have produced remarkable studies of various parts of the Russian frontier.[5] The pioneers of the frontline - the hunter, the trader, and the sectarian - were similar, but the second and third lines of colonization were vastly different. In America, as Turner saw it, lands behind the frontier were cultivated in a regular "four-stages order" by ranchers, farmers, and industrialists. The frontier was pushing the cultivated space to the west. In Russia throughout centuries, the movement of the colonization line to the east left huge lands behind it as virginal as they had been. Later, these empty spaces had to be colonized again, and then again. America's frontier and Russia's colonization had different topologies, the former relatively continuous, the latter leaving in its wake holes, pockets, and folds.
Mapping these internal lands was tough; exploring the peoples who populated them was no easier (Widdis 2004; Tolz 2005). Although in various segments of the immense frontline of Russia's external colonization, "middle grounds" were created that hybridized the colonized and the colonizers, these synthetic cultures were local, variegated, and dispersed over huge stretches of time and space. It is all but impossible to describe them all in one ethno-sociological portrait, as Turner did in his work on the American frontier. Developing centrifugally, these local formations were crucial to the economic development of Russian centers, from Novgorod to Moscow to St.
Petersburg. With gunpowder, alcohol, and germs on their side, the Russians exterminated, absorbed, or displaced many of their neighbors. But these processes took centuries. Multiple waves of adventure, violence, labor, and breeding rolled between Russia's centers and the moving frontline of colonization. Culturally thin, Russia's frontier was geographically broad. However much it changed with time, it always covered huge areas of space. Within these areas, there was no regular transition from hunting to herding or from planting to industrial development. Sometimes trapping remained the only profitable business for centuries; huge cities were sometimes built on land that had never been ploughed. Even Russian capitals were established on territories that were foreign to their founders. Indeed, the lands of Novgorod and Kiev were as foreign to the Varangians who ruled there as the land of St. Petersburg was for the Muscovites. From the borders to the capitals, the space of internal colonization extended throughout Russia.
Shchapov and Zoological Economy
A significant influence on the further development of the self- colonization idea was the historian Afanasii Shchapov, who wrote most of his works not when he was a university professor, but when he was either a state official or a political exile. He was the first who actually thought of Russian colonization not as a vigorous adventure but as a bloody, genuinely political process. It had its victims as well as victors, and the task of a historian was to see both. Teaching history at Kazan Imperial University in the late 1850s, Shchapov sorted out an ecclesiastical archive of the Solovetsky monastery in the far north, which was evacuated to land-locked Kazan as Russia was preparing for the Crimean War (the monastery, thousands of miles from the Crimea, was nonetheless bombed by the British navy in 1854). It was in this remote archive that the leading historian of the next generation, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, wrote his first monograph about "the monastery colonization" of northern Russia; his first critical review was also on Shchapov, of whom he had a "very high opinion" (Nechkina 1974: 434). But by then Shchapov was no longer in Kazan. In 1861, he was accused of fomenting unrest, was arrested, brought to Petersburg, pardoned by the Tsar, and, in a sensational move, was appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Later, exiled to his native Siberia, he still published his revisionist articles in the mainstream Russian journals.
Agreeing with Soloviev that the history of Russia was the history of colonization, Shchapov described the process as a "millennium of colonization and cultivation of woods and swamps, the fight with Finnish, Mongol, and Turkish tribes" (1906: 2/182). An ethnic Creole - son of a Russian deacon and a Siberian Buriat - Shchapov emphasized racial mixing more than any other Russian historian. He was also the true pioneer of ecological history. Two methods of colonization were primary: "fur colonization," with hunters harvesting and depleting the habitats of fur animals and moving further and further across Siberia all the way to Alaska; and "fishing colonization," which supplied Russian centers with fresh- or salt-water fish and caviar. In this attempt at ecological history, Shchapov made an important step forward from Soloviev.
From Rurik the Varangian to Ivan the Terrible, Russia's wealth was measured in fur. Coining the concept of "zoological economy," Shchapov understood fur as the clue to Russia's colonization (1906: 2/280-93, 309-37). Beaver led the Russians to the place where they founded Novgorod; grey squirrel secured them the wealth of Moscow; sable led them to the place that became mapped as Siberia; sea otter brought them to Alaska and California. Throughout the Middle Ages and what elsewhere was known as the Renaissance, man-made migrations of small, wild, furry animals defined the expansion of Russia. Winter roads, trade stations, and militarized storehouses for fur spanned across Eurasia, playing roles that were not dissimilar from the Great Silk Route in medieval Asia. Ecologically, colonization also meant deforestation. "Agricultural colonization" followed "fur colonization" and gradually replaced it. It was not a sword but an axe that moved Russia's colonization, said Shchapov, with the plough following the axe. But the bow and the trap preceded them all. For Shchapov, colonization was an easy and positive concept, which he used on almost every page of his wordy and warm writings. It meant the multi-edged process of exploring, populating, cultivating, and depleting new lands. Russia's colonization had to be understood as parallel histories of peoples moved, animals exterminated, and plants cultivated. It was an unprecedented vision, multidimensional, environmental, and human.
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