‘How will we appear in the eyes of inovertsy and inorodtsy?’ Nikolai Ostroumov on the image and function of Russian power

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of several unpublished manuscripts by the Russian Orientalist, administrator and missionary ideologue Nikolai Petrovich Ostroumov, who spent most of his career in the Turkestan governor-generalship. Ostroumov's violent Islamophobia and close relationship with the colonial administration support to some extent the thesis of Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists that European views of the ‘Orient’ were an epistemological construction of negative attributes that reflected European self-perceptions, and that academic Orientalism was often the handmaiden of colonial power and expansion. However, much of Ostroumov's writing was so abstract and divorced from the social and political realities of Turkestani society that it was of little practical use, something compounded by his view of Orthodox Christianity and Islam as polar opposites. Ostroumov's private writings reveal a deep anxiety regarding the durability of Russian conquest and rule in Central Asia, and paranoia about the decline and destruction of the Christian faith and European civilization.