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.