Postcolonial Empire? Russian Orientologists and the Politics of Knowledge in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

385 Ab Imperio, 3/2011 Sergei GLEBOV POSTCOLONIAL EMPIRE? RUSSIAN ORIENTOLOGISTS AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA In January 1923, with less than a year of his life left, Vladimir Lenin felt compelled to revisit the most crucial question of the history of the Russian Revolution. As most Social Democrats outside of the Bolshevik circle (and some within it) pointed out Russia’s unpreparedness for the socialist transformation , Lenin lashed out at his critics for their “utter inability” to grasp variations and mutations in the “general laws of history.” These critics, Lenin charged, were dismally pedantic, for “it has not even occurred to them that because Russia stands on the borderline between civilized countries and the countries which this war has for the first time definitely brought into the orbit of civilization – all the Oriental, non-European countries – she could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West European countries and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.”1 Although it is tempting to see Lenin’s take as a sign of his extraordinary flexibility in Marxist theory alone, the Communist state founder – who grew up in the startling ethnic and cultural mix 1 V. I. Lenin. Our Revolution (A Propos N. Sukhanov’s Notes) // Collected Works. Vol. 33. Moscow, 1965. Pp. 478-479. 386 Sergei Glebov, Postcolonial Empire? of the Volga region – revealed a certain lasting ambivalence about Russia’s place on the mental map of civilizations. Lenin’s lashing out at “pedantry” might also turn out helpful in the current discussions of Russian “Orientalism.” Scholars of the Russian Empire and the USSR began exploring the issue in the 1990s in the context of expanding studies of the imperial, multiethnic, and multiconfessional past of the Russian Empire. Much of the discussion, following the structural definitions and understanding of “empire” as a range of national groups dominated by a “metropole” on the one hand, and the very well-established mode of thinking about Russia vis-à-vis “the West” on the other, focused on how Russian representations of “Eastern” peoples compared to largely abstract “European” ones.2 The changing frame of the discussion and the emergence of new imperial history with its more nuanced and dynamic understanding of “empire” problematized the dichotomies of both the “Orientalism” itself and its Russian variations. Innovative studies of the production of knowledge in the Russian imperial context demonstrated how crucial categories of Western “cultural domination,” such as race, functioned as rally points for liberal and progressive scholars generally opposed to the current political regime yet committed to a project of inventing the imperial racial “mixed type.”3 Francine Hirsch showed still another instance of the imperial situation : Russian imperial ethnographers enthusiastically participated in the project of national construction among the many peoples of the USSR as the Russian Empire was reinvented as the first socialist “federation” of nations.4 2 Daniel Brower, Edward Lazzerini (Eds.). Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997; Catherine B. Clay. Russian Ethnographers in the Service of Empire, 1856–1862 // Slavic Review. 1995. No. 1. Pp. 45-61; Nathaniel Knight. Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire? // Slavic Review. 2000. No. 59. N. 1. Pp. 74-100; Adib Khalid. Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism; N. Knight. On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid; Maria Todorova. Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution on the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid // Kritika. 2000. Vol. 1. No. 4. Pp. 691-728; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. A Subtle Matter – Orientalism; Alexander Etkind. The Saved Man’s Burden, or the Inner Colonization of Russia; Nathaniel Knight. Was Russia Its Own Orient? Reflections on the Contributions of Etkind and Schimmelpenninck on the Debate on Orientalism; Elena Campbell. On the Question of Orientalism in Russia (in the second half of the 19th–early 20th centuries) //Ab Imperio. 2002. No. 1. Pp. 239-311. See also Etkind. Inner Colonization : Russia’s...