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: