Creating the Peasant as Other: Self-colonisation in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Abstract

ABSTRACT The text discusses Alexander Etkind's controversial work, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (2011), and proposes a way to study the Russian Imperial structures in terms of self-colonisation without diminishing the importance of Russia's colonisation and subjugation of indigenous peoples in Siberia, Central Asia or the Caucasus. It proposes to study the colonisation of the self, not as similar to the colonisation of peoples deemed in colonial discourse to be other, but rather as the subjugation of people belonging to the Russian self. As such, it is not to be conflated with the colonisation of others. Drawing upon examples from Russian literature, the article then offers some examples of how representatives of the Russian self, particularly the peasant class, were othered and subjugated by reforms and by discourse that show how discriminatory and arbitrary laws were when it came to the treatment of peasants in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.