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.