The constructivist paradigm downplays the notions of legacy and historical continuity that inspired several generations of Sovietologists. During the Cold War, many scholars justified their interests by deriving the Soviet institutions from the history of the Russian Empire. Ignoring the changing agency of the rulers and the populus, these straightforward explanations do not seem convincing now. There is no more reason to believe that the Soviet regime was a reincarnation of the Russian Empire than to deduce the peculiarities of post-Soviet Russia from the Soviet regime. Every generation makes its own choice within the window of opportunities that it receives from the past.
However, some of these opportunities and constraints have proven to be surprisingly stable in this part of the world. There are continuities in Russia's geography and ecology that one cannot deny. Russia acquired most of its territory before the institution of the Empire, and the main reason for amassing this territory was fur. With the exhaustion of this natural resource, the state underwent a catastrophic and productive transformation that laid the foundation for the Empire. This was a period of multiple experiments with discovering, appropriating, populating, cultivating, and domesticating - in a word, colonizing - lands within and beyond the moving boundaries of the Empire. For centuries, the Russian state combined its territorial expansion with a strong immigration policy. It imported people, settled and resettled them, and launched experimental forms of population management. Illicit or organized, these movements spanned the elastic continuums of internal versus external, native versus foreign, assimilated versus alien. These spatial oppositions were subordinated to intuitive ideas of temporal order. Old areas of colonization were felt as domestic, recently occupied areas as foreign. Political categories of space emerged from the perception of historical time. The external and the internal swapped ceaselessly. Konigsberg was outside Russian borders for the larger part of its millennial history; but when Russian troops took it, the dwellers of Konigsberg more than once became subjects of the Russian state, as had the people of Ingria where St. Petersburg stands, and as, much earlier, had those who lived where Moscow stands. While military and political borders were expanding outside, the heartland remained underdeveloped. It had to be colonized again, and again. In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian mainstream historians started to use this colonial terminology, and gradually the bureaucratic circles of St. Petersburg accepted it. In 1907-17, Problems of Colonization (Voprosy kolonizatsii) was the title of the official journal of the Resettlement Administration, an agency that had been founded in 1896 within the Ministry of Internal Affairs and later moved into the Ministry of Agriculture. Led by their "etatist and technocratic ethos," officials of this administration oversaw the colonial efforts of the state that were directed both onto the reorganization of the Russian heartlands (Stolypin reforms) and the migration of the peasantry to Siberia, Central Asia, and Transcaucasia (Holquist 2010a). This terminology survived the Bolshevik Revolution but did not outlive Stalinism. In 1922, the Bolshevik government opened the State Scientific Research Institute of Colonization, which functioned until 1930 (Rybakovsky 1998; Hirsch 2005).
In the nineteenth century, Russia was a colonial empire alongside those of Britain or Austria, and a colonized territory like Congo or the West Indies. In its different aspects and periods, Russian culture was both the subject and the object of orientalism. The main paths of colonization led not only outwards, but also into the Russian heartland. These paths led to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific, but also to the lands around Novgorod, Tula, Orenburg, and Odessa. It was there in the heartland that the Empire settled foreign "colonists" and established military "colonies." There in the heartland, Russian nobles owned millions of "souls" and punished millions of bodies. There in the heartland, imperial experts discovered the most unusual communes and collected the most exotic folklore. And it was to these heartlands that Russian pilgrims went in search of their chosen groups of people. The characteristic phenomena of colonialism, such as missionary work, exotic journeys, and ethnographic scholarship, were directed inwards toward the Russian villages as well as outwards and overseas. Expanding into huge spaces, Russia colonized its own people. This was the process of internal colonization, the secondary colonization of one's own territory.
Having "discovered" an alien tribe, the Empire never left it as it was. Mixed, separated, destroyed, or instituted, ethnicities were more like cooked imperial cuisine than the raw products of nature. The imperial situation superimposed multiple dualities. Imperial and colonial elites defined themselves against their lower-class compatriots and also against one another. These correlated processes of self-definition and othering featured different mechanisms from those typical for overseas empires. Like a structuralist, the Empire imposed these binary categories onto the chaotic mosaic of religious differences, property rights, and, finally, geography itself; but the flow of history, a deconstruction in action, inescapably mixed and overruled these dichotomies.
The internal colonization of Russia was more akin to the British colonization of America than that of India: non-Europeans were either assimilated or annihilated, leaving the Empire to embark on colonization of its own people, who gradually formed new identities for themselves. Many spoke the same language and almost all had the same color of skin. Dialectal variation, which had played a critical role in many European cultures, was less characteristic of Russia. In agrarian societies, the cultural distance between the upper and lower strata secured their stability (Gellner 1983, 1998). The main distinctions in such societies, those between the rulers and the commoners, were made visible through all means available to the culture. Because of the contingencies of geography, ecology, and even zoology, in Russia agrarian society became an imperial one, with social distances of the former compounded by political distances of the latter. Instead of naturalizing social and linguistic differences in a racist way, the state codified them in a legal way, creating a system of estates that regulated the access of subjects to education, career, and prosperity.
The reflexivity of internal colonization has lent Russian cultural history a characteristic inconsistency, confusion, and incompleteness, which western observers have sought to explain in a typically orientalist style. The two modes of colonial expansion, the British and the Russian, were so different that Bismarck famously compared them to a whale and a bear. For empires, their different ways of expanding around the globe determined their different methods of colonial administration and military methods, but also their different forms of culture and scholarship. The Russian Empire defined its others by estate and religion; western empires defined them by geography and race. A stable imperial order created a ceaseless, manageable exchange between culture, nature, and the law, with cultural difference naturalized smoothly and legalized effectively. But this exchange turned into an explosive mix every time things went wrong, or in anticipation of such crises. In revolutionary situations, differences were de-naturalized and de-legitimized. The very same intellectuals who were entrusted by the Empire with managing cultural distances realized their cultural, constructed character.
Unusually for European powers, the Russian Empire demonstrated a reversed imperial gradient: people on the periphery lived better than those in the central provinces. The Empire settled foreigners on its lands, giving them privileges over Russians and other locals. Among all ethnicities in the Empire, only Russians and some other eastern Slavs were subject to serfdom. Emancipation began with reforms on the periphery of the Empire and from there moved to the heartland. After Emancipation, Russians were still subjected to heavier economic exploitation than non-Russians.