Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

Alexander Etkind

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

INTERNAL COLONIZATION

RUSSIA'S IMPERIAL EXPERIENCE

ALEXANDER ETKIND

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vi

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction 1

Part I The Non-Traditional Orient

Less than One and Double 13

Worldliness 27

Part II Writing from Scratch

Chasing Rurik 45

To Colonize Oneself 61

Barrels of Fur 72

Part III Empire of the Tsars

Occult Instability 93

Disciplinary Gears 123

Internal Affairs 150

Part IV Shaved Man's Burden

Philosophy Under Russian Rule 173

Sects and Revolution 194

Re-Enchanting the Darkness 214

Sacrificial Plotlines 231

Conclusion 249

References 257

Index 283

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have built up a number of debts that cannot be returned. My parents, art historians Mark Etkind and Julia Kagan, defined my interests in unaccountable ways. My stepfather, philoso­pher Moisei Kagan, and my uncle, literary scholar Efim Etkind, gave examples of brilliance and courage. Every page of this book keeps the breath, temper, and care of Elizabeth Roosevelt Moore, my muse, opponent, and editor. Our sons, Mark and Moses, have inspired and distracted me in the proportion that has been, and will always be, quite right.

Igor Smirnov, Nancy Condee, Svetlana Boym, and Mark Lipovetsky gave this work early and invaluable encouragement. Oleg Kharkhordin, Irina Prokhorova, Irene Masing-Delic, and Alastair Renfrew edited the first versions of some of these ideas; their long-standing support is much appreciated. Conversations with Gyan Prakash helped me receive some wisdom from the mainstream of postcolonial studies. Eli Zaretsky and John Thompson were instrumental in making me write it all down. An exciting conference, Russia's Internal Colonization, which Dirk Uffelmann and I organized at the University of Passau - an adventure from which we, along with Ilia Kukulin, have still not returned - resuscitated my interest in the subject. Simon Franklin, Emma Widdis, Rory Finnin, Jana Howlett, Caroline Humphrey, and Harald Wydra have been wonderful colleagues throughout these years.I presented parts of this book at the brown-bag seminar of the Slavonic Department of Cambridge University, a "Found in Translation" conference at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, a Eurasian conference at Hangyang University in Seoul, and also at lively seminars at Durham, Sodertorn, and Stanford. The questions and comments of colleagues in these and other places found their way into this book. Several scholars read parts of this manuscript and commented generously. They are, in chronological order, Willard Sunderland, Maria Maiofis, Simon Franklin, William Todd, Mark Bassin, Dirk Uffelmann, Marina Mogilner, Eric Naiman, David Moon, Ruben Gallo, Michael Minden, Peter Holquist, Jana Howlett, Valeria Sobol, Jane Burbank, and Tony La Vopa. Sarah Lambert, Sarah Dancy, and two anonymous reviewers of Polity Press were very helpful.

Parts of Chapters 6, 7, and 12 were published in the Russian jour­nals, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and Ab Imperio. Part of Chapter 10 was published as "Whirling With the Other: Russian Populism and Religious Sects," Russian Review 62 (October 2003), pp. 565-88. Part of Chapter 8 was published as "Internalizing Colonialism: Intellectual Endeavors and Internal Affairs in Mid-nineteenth Century Russia," in Peter J. S. Dunkan (ed.), Convergence and Divergence: Russia and Eastern Europe into the Twenty-First Century (London: SSEES, 2007), pp. 103-20. Part of Chapter 5 was published as "Barrels of Fur: Natural Resources and the State in the Long History of Russia," Journal of Eurasian Studies 2/2 (2011). Part of Chapter 12 was published as "The Shaved Man's Burden: The Russian Novel as a Romance of Internal Colonization," in Alastair Renfrew and Galin Tihanov (eds), Critical Theory in Russia and the West (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 124-51.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Joseph Swain, "Save me from my friends!", 1878. 33

Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working

on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. 40

Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov, Rurik's Arrival

at Ladoga, 1909. 46

Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov, portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815). 54

Figure 5: Aleksei Olenin, Demeter-Ceres, a Greek-Roman

Goddess 1812. 57

Figure 6: Vasilii Surikov, Ermak's conquest of

Siberia, 1895. 80

Figure 7: Coat of Arms of the Stroganovs, 1753. 85

Figure 8: The coat of arms of Abram Gannibal (c. 1742). 96

Figure 9: Karl Briullov, A Portrait of an Officer

with his Servant (1830s). 117

Figure 10: Johann Reinhold Forster. The map of German

colonies on the Volga,1768. 130

Figure 11: A cavalry training ring in Selishche,

near Novgorod, built in 1818-25. 137

Figure 12: The Perovsky descendants of Aleksei

Razumovsky (1748-1822). 153

Figure 13: Karl Briullov, Vasilii Perovsky on the capital

of a column, 1824. 154

Figure 14: Pushkin and Dal presented on

an icon as St Kozma and St Damyan. 163

Figure 15: Andrei Bolotov's self-portrait, c. 1790. 183

Figure 16: Afanasii Shchapov, 1872. 195

Figure 17: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich, October 16,

1918. 209

Figure 18: Ilia Repin. Portrait of Nikolai Leskov, 1888. 225

Introduction

In 1927 in Moscow, Walter Benjamin noted that Russia had no use for the romantic concept of the east. "Everything in the world is here on our own soil," his Russian friends told him. "For us there is no 'exoticism'," they stated; exoticism is nothing but "the counterrevo­lutionary ideology of a colonial nation." But having killed the idea of the east, these intellectuals and filmmakers brought it back to life again, and on a huge scale. For their new films "the most interesting subject" was Russian peasants, a group that these intellectuals believed were deeply different from themselves: "The mode of mental reception of the peasant is basically different from that of the urban masses." When these peasants watched films, they seemed to be incapable of following "two simultaneous narrative strands of the kind seen countless times in film. They can follow only a single series of images that must unfold chronologically." Benjamin's friends maintained that since peasants did not understand genres and themes "drawn from bourgeois life," they needed an entirely new art, and creating this art constituted "one of the most grandiose mass- psychological experiments in the gigantic laboratory that Russia ha[d] become." Despite Benjamin's sympathies towards both the new film and the new Russia, his conclusion was wary: "The filmic colo­nization of Russia has misfired," he wrote (1999: 13-14).

Studying imperial Russia, scholars have produced two stories. One concerns a great country that competes successfully, though unevenly, with other European powers, produces brilliant literature, and stages unprecedented social experiments. The other story is one of economic backwardness, unbridled violence, misery, illiteracy, despair, and col­lapse. I subscribe to both of these at once. In contrast to the Russian peasants whom Benjamin's friends exoticized in line with an age-long tradition, scholars cannot afford one-track thinking. But scholarship is not a dual carriageway, either. We need to find a way to coordinate the different stories that we believe in. My solution is a kind of Eisensteinian montage interwoven with an overarching principle, which in this book is internal colonization. I propose this concept as a metaphor or mechanism that makes the Russian Empire compara­ble to other colonial empires of the past. So, in this book, the two Russian stories combine into one: the story of internal colonization, in which the state colonized its people.

In 1904, the charismatic historian Vasilii Kliuchevsky wrote that Russian history is "the history of a country that colonizes itself. The space of this colonization widened along with the territory of the state" (1956: 1/31).[1] Coextensive with the state, self-colonization was not directed away from the state borders but expanded along with the movement of these borders, filling the internal space in waves of various intensities. At that moment, this formula of Russia's self- colonization had already had a long history in Russian thought, which I describe in Chapter 4. Enriched by twentieth-century colonial and postcolonial experiences, we can draw further conclusions from this classical formula. Russia has been both the subject and the object of colonization and its corollaries, such as orientalism. The state was engaged in the colonization of foreign territories and it was also concerned with colonizing the heartlands. Peoples of the Empire, including the Russians, developed anti-imperial, nationalist ideas in response. These directions of Russia's colonization, internal and external, sometimes competed and sometimes were indistinguishable. Dialectic in standstill, as Benjamin put it, but also an explosive mix that invites oxymoronic concepts such as internal colonization.

Exploring the historical experience of the Russian Empire before the revolutionary collapse of 1917, this book illuminates its relevance for postcolonial theory. However, I turn the focus onto Russia's inter­nal problems, which have not previously been discussed in postcolo- nial terms. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in the causes and results of the Russian revolution has paled in comparison to the explosion of research on the Russian Orient, orientalism, and Empire.[2]

Historians have learned to avoid the Soviet-style, teleological approach to the revolution and the terror that followed, which explains the preceding events as "the preparation" for the subsequent ones. However, historians - and all of us - need explanations for why the Russian revolution and the Stalinist terror occurred on the terri­tory of the Russian Empire. Such explanations cannot be sought exclusively in the preceding era, but they, or at least a part of them, also cannot be disconnected from the historical past. I do not aim to explain the revolution, but I do believe that a better grasp of imperial Russia can help us toward a clearer understanding of the Soviet century. I am also trying to bridge the gap between history and litera­ture, a gap that few like but many maintain. Some time ago, Nancy Condee formulated the idea that while area studies is an interdisci­plinary forum, cultural studies "incorporate[s] interdisciplinarity into the project itself" (1995: 298). This book is a project in cultural studies.

Incorporating different disciplines, voices, and periods is a risky task for a cultural historian. I take courage in the idea that high lit­erature and culture in Russia played significant roles in the political process. As I will demonstrate in several examples, "transformation­ist culture" was an important aspect of internal colonization. Due to a paradoxical mechanism that Michel Foucault helps to elucidate in his "repressive hypothesis" (Foucault 1998; see also Rothberg 2009), oppression made culture politically relevant and power culturally productive. For an empire such as Russia's, its culture was both an instrument of rule and a weapon of revolution. Culture was also a screen on which the endangered society saw itself - a unique organ of self-awareness, critical feedback, warning, and mourning.

In Russia, social revolutions resulted in magnificent and tragic trans­formations. However, the continuities of this country's geography and history have also been remarkable. Russia emerged on the inter­national arena at the same time as the Portuguese and Spanish Empires; it grew in competition with great terrestrial empires, such as the Austrian and Ottoman in the west, the Chinese and North American in the east; it matured in competition with the modern maritime empires, the British and French; and it outlived most of them. An interesting measure, the sum total of square kilometers that an empire controlled each year over the centuries, shows that the Russian Empire was the largest in space and the most durable in time of all historical empires, covering 65 million square kilometer-years for Muskovy/Russia/Soviet Union versus 45 million for the British Empire and 30 million for the Roman Empire (Taagepera 1988). At about the time when the Russian Empire was established, the average radius of a European state was about 160 kilometers; given the speed of communication, a viable state could not dominate more than a 400-kilometer radius (Tilly 1990: 47). The distance between St. Petersburg (established in 1703) and Petropavlovsk (1740) is about 9,500 kilometers. The Empire was enormous and its problems grew with its size. But throughout the imperial period, tsars and their advisors referred to the vastness of Russia's space as the main reason for its imperial empowerment, centralization, and further expansion.

Larger than the Soviet Union and much larger than the current Russian Federation, the Empire of the tsars stretched from Poland and Finland to Alaska, Central Asia, and Manchuria. Russian sol­diers took Berlin in 1760 and Paris in 1814. After the victory over Napoleon, Russian diplomats created the Holy Alliance, the first modern attempt to integrate Europe. The Empire was constantly engaged in colonial wars over disputed domains in Europe and Asia; it oversaw the impressive advance into the Pacific; it evoked and sup­pressed a mutiny in the Urals, several revolts in Poland, and a per­manent rebellion in the Caucasus. With the sale of Alaska in 1867, the Empire began to shrink; this tendency would continue in the twentieth century. But the Petersburg rulers dreamed about Constantinople and expansion into the Balkans and the Near East, an ambition that fueled military efforts up to World War I. The series of Russian revolutions changed both the map of Europe and the structure of the Russian state. Starting as a furious outburst of anti- imperial sentiments, the revolutions of 1917 led to new enslavement. After World War II, the growth of the Muscovite state continued when other western empires disintegrated. Even when the USSR col­lapsed, the loss of territory was smaller than what the western empires experienced with their decolonization. With surprise, the twenty-first century is watching the imperial resurgence of post-Soviet Russia.

The enormity of the space gives the easiest explanation for a "tra­ditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity," as it was described by George Kennan in his famous Long Telegram (1946) that ignited the Cold War. Importantly, Kennan added that this "neurotic view" afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people. In light of the eventful time that has passed since Kennan sent his telegram off, his point can be sharpened. Throughout the larger part of Russian history, a neurotic fear, which is mixed with desire, focused not only on the enemies beyond the borders but also on the space inside them. This internal space happened to be populated, somewhat unfortunately for the rulers, by the subject peoples, Russians and non-Russians.

Led by Edward Said (1978, 1993), postcolonial scholars have emphasized the significance of oceans that separated the imperial centers from their distant colonies. In some of these writings, overseas imperialism feels different - more adventurous, consequential, and repressive - in a word, more imperialist than terrestrial imperialism. However, before railways and the telegraph, terrestrial space was less passable than the high seas. In times of peace, it was faster and cheaper to transport cargo from Archangel to London by sea than from Archangel to Moscow by land. In times of war, shipments of troops and supplies proved to travel much faster from Gibraltar to Sebastopol than from Moscow to the Crimea. In the mid-eighteenth century, the German scholar, Gerhard Friedrich Muller, led a Russian expedition to Siberia; the distance that Muller traveled there was about equal to the circumference of the Earth. In the early nineteenth century, it was four times more expensive to supply the Russian bases in Alaska by transporting food across Siberia than to carry it by sea around the world (Istoriia 1997: 239-7). It took two years for Russians to transport fur across Siberia to the Chinese border; American ships did the job in five months (Foust 1969: 321). Technically and psychologically, India was closer to London than many areas of the Russian Empire were to St. Petersburg. And there were no subjects living on the high seas, no strange, poor people who had to be defeated, tamed, settled and resettled, taxed, and con­scripted. Two theoretically opposing but, in practice, curving and merging vectors of external and internal colonization competed for limited resources, human, intellectual, and financial. The oceans con­nected, while land divided.

Created by its rulers in their effort to make Russia a viable and competitive power, this Empire was a cosmopolitan project. Much like contemporary scholars, Russian Emperors compared Russia with other European empires. Almost until their end, the tsars focused on the troublemaking areas on Russia's periphery and construed the core Russian population as a God-given, though limited and unreliable, resource. Having colonized its multiple territories, Russia applied typically colonial regimes of indirect rule - coercive, communal, and exoticizing - to its population. Rich in coercion and poor in capital, the Empire had to master and protect its enormous lands, which were taken for various purposes that had been largely forgotten. In Lev Tolstoy's story, "How much land does a man need?," a peasant goes from "overpopulated" Central Russia to a colonized steppe in Bashkiria, where friendly nomads offer him as much land as he can encircle in a day. He walks and runs from sunrise to sunset and dies of exhaustion when he completes the circle. He is buried on the spot: this, enough for a grave, is how much land man needs, says Tolstoy. But he himself bought one estate after another, subsidizing his agri­cultural experiments with the royalties from his novels.

Human grammar distinguishes between subject and object, while human history does not necessarily do so. Self-imposed tasks - self- discipline, internal control, colonization of one's own kind - are inherently paradoxical. Languages, including scholarly ones, get into trouble when they confront these self-referential constructions. In the twenty-first century, scholars of globalization meet the same logical difficulties as the scholars of Russian imperial history met in the nineteenth century. Of course, I hope that the world of the future will be no more similar to imperial Russia than it will be to British India. But the experience and experiments of the Russian Empire can still teach us some lessons.

So, what is internal colonization - a metaphor or a mechanism? Many philosophical books argue that this is an incorrect distinction, but I do not think so. As much as I can, I am relying on the precise words of historical subjects in which they formulated their concerns. One scholar of contemporary empires states that since the concept of empire has been applied indiscriminately, the way to learn what an empire is, is to look at those who apply this word to themselves (Beissinger 2006). In a similar move, I survey the changing use of the words "colonization" and "self-colonization" in Russian historiog­raphy. Although in Russia the historical actors employed this termi­nology infrequently, the historical authors used it profusely, and they started to do it much earlier and with more sense than I had expected when I started this research. As a metaphor that reveals a mechanism, internal colonization is an old, well-tested tool of knowledge.

Two components always comprise colonization: culture and poli­tics. Pure violence manifests itself in genocide, not colonization. Cultural influence leads to education, not colonization. Whenever we talk about the colonization processes, we see cultural hegemony and political domination working together in some kind of coalition, cor­relation, or confrontation. Jurgen Habermas speaks about internal colonization as a framework for various cognitive and even consti­tutional developments in modern societies. Social imperatives "make their way into the lifeworld from the outside - like colonial masters coming into a tribal society - and force a process of assimilation upon it" (1987: 2/355). Habermas's analogy is between colonialism over­seas and a monolingual European society, which assimilates moder­nity as if it had been introduced by colonial masters, but which actually imposes it on itself. Even in this broad usage, the concept of internal colonization presumes an aggressive confrontation of alien forces. Habermas clearly describes a cultural conflict, though this conflict is not based on ethnic or language difference.

According to classical definitions, colonization (and its ideological system, colonialism) refers to the processes of domination in which settlers migrate from the colonizing group to the colonized land, while imperialism is a form of domination that does not require resettlement (N.R. 1895; Hobson 1902; Horvath 1972). Theoretically, definitions of colonization do not specify whether any particular migration evolved within the national borders or outside them, or whether such borders even existed at the time. In practice, however, and also in intuition, colonization has usually meant travel abroad. Against this backdrop, the concept of internal colonization connotes the culture-specific domination inside the national borders, actual or imagined. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several important scholars used this concept. Prussian and German politi­cians launched an ambitious program of internal colonization in Eastern Europe, which was fed by all kinds of knowledge, faked and real. Russian imperial historians used the concept of "self-coloniza­tion," producing a powerful discourse that has been largely forgotten. The ideas of one of these historians, the brilliant but maverick Afanasii Shchapov (1830-76), expose themselves intermittently in my book.

Following the Russian revolution and decolonization of the Third World, the concept of internal colonization took a long break. In 1951, Hannah Arendt (1970) introduced the concept of the colonial boomerang, the process in which imperial powers bring their prac­tices of coercion from their colonies back home. A few years later, Aime Cesaire (1955) formulated a similar concept, the reverse shock of imperialism, which he saw in the Holocaust. After 1968, social scientists reinvented the concept of internal colonization with the aim of applying postcolonial language to the internal problems of metro­politan countries. The American sociologist Robert Blauner (1969) looked at aspects of the domestic situation of African Americans, such as ghetto life and urban riots, as processes of internal coloniza­tion. In his lectures of 1975-6, the French philosopher Michel Foucault used the same concept in the broader sense of bringing colonial models of power back to the west (2003: 103). The British sociologist Michael Hechter (1975) used the concept of internal colo­nialism in his book about the core and periphery of the British Isles, with a particular focus on Welsh politics. Revising the classical concept, Hechter neutralized the geographical distance between the colonizer and the colonized, formerly the definitive feature of British- style colonialism. However, in his case studies, he still needed the ethnic difference between the mother country and the colony (say, between the English and the Welsh) to make his concept work. After Hechter, the next step was to deconstruct ethnic difference, revealing the internal colonialism inside the mosaic ethnic field that is struc­tured by cultural reifications of power. In this meaning, concepts of internal colonization/colonialism were used by the historian Eugen Weber (1976), the sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner (1977), the anthro­pologist James C. Scott (1998), the literary scholar Mark Netzloff (2003), and a group of medievalists (Fernandez-Armesto and Muldoon 2008). In her book on mid-twentieth-century French culture, the historian Kristin Ross observed how France turned to "a form of interior colonialism" when "rational administrative tech­niques developed in the colonies were brought home" (1996: 7). Several critics reviewed the idea of internal colonization, usually with mixed feelings (Hind 1984; Love 1989; Liu 2000; Calvert 2001). Some prominent historians have mentioned the colonial nature of Russia's internal rule but have never elaborated on this thesis (Braudel 1967: 62; Rogger 1993; Ferro 1997: 49; Lieven 2003: 257; Snyder 2010: 20, 391). Postcolonial studies all but ignore the Russian aspect of their larger story. In studies of Russian literature and history, however, the concept of internal colonization has been discussed by several authors (Groys 1993; Etkind 1998, 2002, 2007; Kagarlitsky 2003; Viola 2009; Condee 2009).

Developing this worldly concept, I wish to combine it with more traditional, text-oriented concerns of cultural history. This is a triple task - historical, cultural, and political. As a Russian specialist, I cannot agree more with Ann Laura Stoler who specializes in Southeast Asia: "[T]he omission of colonialisms (internal or otherwise) from national histories is political through and through" (2009: 34). However, I demonstrate that this omission has never been complete in classic Russian historiography. It is necessary to understand the political reasons for both the presence and the omission of internal colonization in the national and imperial historiography. Chapter 5, probably the most controversial in this book, historicizes twenty-first- century Russia in a deep, longue duree way by moving from cultural history to political economy. I have no intention of finding an invari­able condition that spans through centuries, but I do strive to under­stand the recurrent interplays between the contingent factors of geography, ecology, and politics that shaped Russia's experience. As has happened in other spheres of postcolonial studies, my focus in this book shifts from describing historical events and social practices of the imperial past to engaging with cultural texts that depicted this past before me, the texts that define our very ability to imagine this past along with its events and practices. This shift structures this book thematically and chronologically.

Chapters 1 and 2 expose the Cold War context of Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" and complement Said by following some of his heroes through their Russian adventures. In Chapter 3, I dig into the debates on the origins of the Russian monarchy, as they articulated the nature of Russia's internal colonization. Chapter 4 traces the robust self-colonization paradigm in the mainstream his­toriography of Russia, as it developed in the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 discusses the fuel of Russia's pre-modern boom, the fur trade, which established the enormous territory that later underwent troubles, schisms, and recolonizations. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the peculiar institutions of this colonization, such as estate and commune. Constructing an analogy between the classical problems of race and the Russian construction of estate, I invite the reader to St. Petersburg to follow its transformation from a colonial outpost into the wonder of the Enlightenment. Chapter 8 examines the fierce intellectual activ­ities of a ruling institution of imperial Russia, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The last part of this book consists of case studies in the cul­tural history of the Empire. Chapter 9 examines an unexpected figure, Immanuel Kant, during his period as a Russian subject. I take issue with the recent criticism of Kant as ignorant or insensitive toward colonial oppression. On the contrary, my perspective presents him as an early (post)colonial thinker. In Chapter 10, I look at the Russian religious movements and explore their revolutionary connections, mythical and real. Exoticizing the people and construing their "under­ground life," the late nineteenth-century missionaries, historians, and ethnographers ascribed to them the most unbelievable features; as a result, populists and socialists counted on these popular sects in the self-imposed task of the revolution, which was no less incredible. Chapter 11 compares the anti-imperial narratives of two major authors that were, in their different ways, both fascinated with impe­rial Russia and sharply critical toward it, Joseph Conrad and Nikolai Leskov. Using three classical texts, Chapter 12 explores the Russian novel as a sacrificial mechanism that re-enacts the changing relations between classes and genders within the Empire. This chapter com­bines Mikhail Bakhtin's and Rene Girard's theoretical perspectives on the novel with the historical context of internal colonization. Throughout this book, I place some great names, Russian and western - Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Kant and Conrad - in unusual contexts; I also introduce a number of figures that may be less known to the reader. Ever concerned about territory, colonization is about people. Proponents, victims, and heretics of colonizations internal or exter­nal, the protagonists of this book constitute a multicolored, paradoxi­cal crowd.

Part I

The Non-Traditional Orient

Less than One and Double

On March 25, 1842, in St. Petersburg, one official lost his nose. This noseless person, Kovalev, had just returned from the Caucasus, the embattled southern border of the Russian Empire. In the imperial capital, he was seeking a promotion that would put him in charge of a nice, bribable province of central Russia. But Kovalev's nose betrayed him. His face was flat. Without his nose, he could not visit his women. He even missed a job interview, so strong was the shame of being noseless. Finally, his nose was captured on its way to Riga, the western border of the Empire. "Russia is a wonderful country," wrote Nikolai Gogol who composed this story. "One has only to mention an official" and all his peers, administrators "from Riga to Kamchatka," unanimously believe that "you are talking about them" (Gogol 1984: 3/42). From the Caucasus to St. Petersburg and from Riga to Kamchatka: it's a long trip for a nose.

Career of Improvement

Gogol's "The Nose" is a beautiful example of what Homi Bhabha calls the "colonial doubling," which summarizes the processes of loss, splitting, and reconfiguration that are essential for the colonial situ­ation. We can lose a part in many interesting ways, from castration, or decolonization, or even from shaving, or some combination of these. Presenting a faceless colonial administrator, Gogol analyzes his nose as an imperial fetish, a "metonymy of presence" where presence is unreachable and its signs, unrecognizable. Indeed, for Kovalev, there was no presence without his nose. Without the part, everything that the whole required - office, power, women - became unreachable. When in its proper place, the nose is just a little part of Kovalev's wholeness, a metonymy of his impeccable functioning as the corporeal and imperial subject. Lost, the nose turns into the all- embracing symbol for Kovalev's unaccomplished dreams and aspira­tions, the summary metaphor for all those goods, bodies, and statuses - vice-governorship, fortunate bride, social pleasures - which are unreachable for the noseless. The part is made into a fetish only after it has been lost. The Hegelian relations of master and slave are analo­gous to Gogolian relations of the whole and the part. As long as the part is the slave of the whole, the order is safe; but the rebellion of the part has more dramatic effects than the rebellion of the slave, because it questions the deepest, the most naturalized perceptions of the social order. Colonial differences cross-penetrate all social bodies, including the body of Kovalev. Together, Kovalev and his separatist nose make a wonderful illustration for the enigmatic, Gogolian formula that Bhabha repeats without explaining: "less than one and double" (Bhabha 1994: 130, 166).

An imperial author with an exemplary biography, Gogol was born in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg where he failed first as an official and then as a historian, succeeded as a writer, and failed again as a political thinker. He belongs to the list of great colonial authors, along with James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. The plot of Dead Souls was an imperial project; with his Napoleonic look, the protagonist Chichikov plans to resettle the purchased peasants to a recently colo­nized land near Kherson in the southern steppe and to mortgage them to the state. The fact that the peasants were dead makes their trans­portation easier. Kherson was the land of the notorious Potemkin villages, but the internal provinces that Chichikov visited on his way were no more trustworthy. Dead Souls should be read as the saga of Russia's colonization, a text on a par with the British Robinson Crusoe or the American Moby Dick. When Gogol's Inspector-General went on stage in 1836, hostile critics targeted precisely this colonial aspect of Gogol's inspiration. These horrible events could never have happened in central Russia, only in Ukraine or Belorussia; or even worse, continued a critic, they could have happened "only on the Sandwich Islands that captain Cook visited" (Bulgarin 1836). With and without their lost noses and dead souls, Gogol's characters were precise images "of a post-Enlightenment man tethered to . . . his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence . . . repeats his action at a distance" (Bhabha 1994: 62). The colonial nature of Gogol's inspiration has been emphasized by a more recent wave of scholarship, which was itself inspired by the post-Soviet transformation of Ukraine (Shkandrij 2001; Bojanowska 2007). Understandably, postcolonial scholars have focused on Gogol's Ukrainian roots and stories. The colonial nature of his works on Russia and the Russians, such as "The Nose" and Dead Souls, have eluded them, because such an understanding requires the concept of internal colonization. I believe that postcolonial criticism clarifies Gogol, but the opposite is also true: Gogol helps us to understand Bhabha.

In 1835, when Gogol was teaching Universal History at St. Petersburg Imperial University and Kovalev was starting his service in the Caucasus, Lord Macaulay delivered his Minute on Indian Education. Working for the Viceroy of India, Macaulay argued that only teaching English to the Indian elite would create the "interpret­ers between us and the millions whom we govern." He referred to Russia as the positive model:

Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previ­ously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance. . . . I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions. . . . There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. (Macaulay 1862: 109-10)

For Macaulay, the west and the east were but steps on the worldwide ladder of history. Where England was in the tenth century, Russia was in the eighteenth and Punjab in the nineteenth. In this vision, the higher stages smoothly replaced the lower ones in the mother country. In the large space of empire, these different stages of progress all coexisted; moreover, they became known to the politician mainly because of their coexistence in the imperial domain rather than because of their obscure traces in the national archive. In India and Russia, higher races, castes, and estates cohabited with lower ones. The imperial task was to make order out of this chaos, which meant creating categories, managing hierarchies, regulating distances. After Peter the Great, "the languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindu what they have done for the Tartar," said Macaulay.

A few years later, the leading Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote that, without Peter the Great, Russia "would probably still have accepted European civilization but it would have done so in the same way in which India adopted the English one" (1954: 5/142). In other words, Belinsky saw Russia's westernization as a response to the anxiety of being colonized by the west, though of course this anxiety was also a European influence, one of those languages that Russia, like India, imported from the west. As a matter of fact, India was a colony and Russia was an empire, which made Macaulay's comparison a little forced; what is interesting is that he did not notice it. For Belinsky and his readers, Russia's sovereignty - its difference from India - was the crucial fact. The imperial gradi­ent between the higher and lower groups was immense in the British and Russian Empires; in the former the difference was mainly between the mother country and the colony, while in the latter the difference was mainly between groups within the mother country. Although straight in the national domain, the line of progress curved and folded within its imperial possessions. Later, Marxist theorists struggled with the same issue. Lev Trotsky called it "combined and uneven development" (1922, 1959). In his vision, advanced and backward societies coexisted in Russia simultaneously and "traumatically"; their contradictions would "inevitably" result in a revolution (Knei- Paz 1978: 95).

During the High Imperial Period, which lasted from Russia's victory in the Napoleonic War (1814) to its defeat in the Crimean War (1856), the Russian educated class spoke and wrote French as well as Russian. German was a heritage language for many, and English was for the creme de la creme. The famous works of Russian litera­ture depicted this polyglossia and were often inspired by French examples (Meyer 2009). In Aleksandr Pushkin's novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin (1832), Tatiana's letter of love was written in French. Typical for ladies of high society, Tatiana's Russian was worse than her French, explained Pushkin. French was the language of women and family life; Russian was the language of men, of the military service and the household economy where work was carried out by serfs and soldiers. In Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), where the action takes place during the Napoleonic War, the officers and offi­cials who were fighting with the French speak French with their wives and daughters, Russian to their subordinates, and mix the languages when talking to their peers. Unlike Pushkin, who in his novel "trans­lated" Tatiana's letter into Russian verse, Tolstoy wrote these long dialogues in French and published them with no translation, expect­ing his readers to understand them. But his public was changing rapidly and within a few years he had to translate these French sec­tions into Russian for the next edition of his masterpiece.

After reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a former officer of the Imperial Guard, Petr Chaadaev, asked in 1836: Does Russia also have a destiny? His answer was devastating: "We live in our houses as if we are stationed there; in our families we have the outlook of foreigners; in our cities we are similar to nomads, we are worse than nomads." At exactly the time when the Empire was as rich and large as never before, the imperial elite felt as if they were invaders stationed in their own cities, homes, and lives. "Our remem­brances do not go deeper than yesterday; we are foreign to our­selves. . . . Our experiences disappear as we are moving ahead. This is a natural consequence of a culture that is entirely borrowed and imitated" (Chaadaev 1914: 110). Illustrating his thesis, Chaadaev compared the Russians to the Native Americans. He asserted that there were "people of outstanding depth" among the Native Americans, but the Russians had no sages who could be compared to these natives (Chaadaev 1914: 116; Etkind 2001b: 24). These feelings of the foreignness in the native land, the stoppage of time, and the imitative character of culture were subjective components of reversed, internal orientalism (Condee 2009: 27).

Chaadaev wrote his epistle in French, but when it was published in Russian translation, it caused a scandal. Denouncing Chaadaev, one official with Siberian experience wrote that he "denies everything to us, puts us lower than the American savages" (Vigel 1998: 78). Awakened by Chaadaev, a group of intellectuals turned his cultural criticism into the call for nationalist reawakening. Having adopted an unfortunate name, the Slavophiles, they reinvented the global language of anti-imperial protest that was rooted in the French Enlightenment, the American Revolution, Edmund Burke's criticism of British policies in India, the experience of the Napoleonic wars, and, last but not least, the Polish rebellions against the Russian Empire.

In 1836, Gogol described St. Petersburg as "something similar to a European colony in America: there are as few people of the native ethnicity here [St. Petersburg] and as many foreigners who have not yet been amalgamated into the solid mass" (1984: 6/162). Like many Russian intellectuals of his time, Gogol was very interested in America and even dreamed about emigration to the US. Comparing the impe­rial capital to America sounded good to this outsider. In a remarkable twist, the conservative Russians of the 1840s employed the language of colonial discontent for their criticism against their own culture. A former officer of the Imperial Guard, Aleksei Khomiakov, wrote in 1845 that in Russia, the Enlightenment took "a colonial character."

In 1847, he characterized the educated society in Russia as "a colony of eclectic Europeans, thrown into a country of savages." He also stated that the enlightened Russia "fashioned itself in an aggressive way, like a European colony anywhere in the world, conceiving the conquest with best intentions but without means to realize them and . . . without a superiority of spirit that could give some kind of justification for the conquest." He characterized this "colonial relationship" as "the struggle" between "the entirely unjustified repulsion" on the part of the elite toward the people and "the well-justified suspicion" on the part of the people towards the elite. On this base, Khomiakov diagnosed in the Russian society "fundamental doubling," "imitativeness," "false half-knowledge," "a lifeless orphanhood," and "cerebral deadliness." Like his favorite writer, Gogol, he loved the metaphor of doubling/splitting (razdvoe- nie) and used it profusely. Doubling was induced by the Petrine reforms but increased after that. Doubling was an unavoidable result of too abrupt, too rapid social change. Doubling separated the life of the people and the life of the higher estates. "Where the society is doubled - a deadly formalism reigns the day" (Khomiakov 1988: 100, 43, 152, 96, 139). Much earlier, Khomiakov (1832) wrote a tragedy about the legendary Ermak, a Cossack who conquered Siberia for the Russian crown. Far from glorifying Ermak, it shows a repent­ing criminal, cursed by his father, convicted by the Tsar, and betrayed by the fellow Cossacks. A Shaman offers him the crown of Siberia, but he prefers suicide. If it were a story about Montezuma, it would have been perceived as an early and strong anti-imperial statement; Ermak has never been successful on stage, with either the critics or the historians. Khomiakov spent many years writing a multi-volume saga of peoples' migrations and resettlements, starting from the anti­quity. An Anglophone and Anglophile, he speculated about the colo­nized Celts, Indians, and Hottentots. Colonial practices were in his mind, whether he was writing about Russia or the world. One of the most gifted people of his time - an amateur engineer, artist, historian, and theologian - Khomiakov was piously Orthodox, like other Slavophiles, but in his own creative way (Engelstein 2009). Through the years, he corresponded with a cleric from Oxford about a unifica­tion of Orthodox and Anglican churches; he even believed that the same could happen with the Calvinists (Khomiakov 1871: 105).

While the British administration was introducing English in Indian schools, Macaulay's Russian counterpart, the Minister of the Enlightenment Sergei Uvarov, decided that the Europeanization of Russia had gone too far. Reporting in 1843 about the first decade of his ministerial job, he saw his success in "healing the new generation of its blind, thoughtless predisposition towards the foreign and the superficial" (Uvarov 1864). Remarkably, Uvarov drafted his projects for the new "national" education in French but then switched to Russian (Zorin 1997). A dilettante orientalist but a professional administrator, Uvarov was responding to a wave of popular senti­ment that was universal for post-Napoleonic Europe.

A long time has passed since Macaulay and Uvarov planned to re-educate their spacious domains. As in India, nationalism in Russia took two competing forms, rebellious and anti-imperial on the one hand, official and pre-emptive on the other. If Peter I was a model for Macaulay, Lev Tolstoy was an influence on Mahatma Gandhi. Russia was a great European power alongside those of Britain or France, and a territory that received its civilization from the west, like Africa or India. This is why Macaulay compared the Russian Empire not to the British Empire but to its colony, India. It was to the Russians themselves and not to the Poles or the Aleuts, that the Empire was teaching French with the success that Macaulay wanted to emulate and Uvarov to unwind. This success did not last long, but it was important for all aspects of imperial culture and politics. It divided the intellectuals into those who mourned the lost originality of native ways and those who welcomed the bursting creativity of cultural hybridization, a divide well known to the schol­ars of colonial cultures. "Learning is nothing but imitation," pro­claimed a leading academic historian, Sergei Soloviev, whose son, Vladimir, became the most original Russian philosopher (1856: 501). Through the High Imperial Period, the understanding of Russia as an imperial and a colonial country was shared even by those who did not have much else in common. A late and revisionist follower of the Slavophiles, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1860 that no country is less understood than Russia; even the moon is better explored, wrote Dostoevsky, who was in the know: he had just been released from a Siberian prison camp. In his vision, the people of Russia were sphinx-like - mysterious and omniscient; he called on his public to approach the people with an Oedipal feeling of awe (1993: 12-13). The philosopher and governmental official, Konstantin Kavelin, used the same colonial rhetoric in 1866, justifying the slow pace of the reforms that he helped to write into the law: "Imagine a colonist who starts a household in the wilderness. . . . Whatever he did his success would not be able to stand comparison with the life standard of a town. . . . We are the very same colonists" (Kavelin 1989: 182).

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:

For us Germans the slogan of "inner colonization" is catastrophic. . . . It is no accident that it is always primarily the Jew who tries and suc­ceeds in planting such mortally dangerous modes of thought in our people. . . . Any German internal colonization . . . can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil. (Hitler 1969: 125, 128)

Boomerang Effect

In the 1920s, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci characterized the relations between different regions of his country, the north and the south, as colonial exploitation. Better than his predecessors, he real­ized the internal complexity of this intra-ethnic colonization. Its cultural vector, which he called hegemony, diverged from its political vector (domination) and its economic vector (exploitation). All three had to be considered separately, because their directions were differ­ent or even the opposite. Regions of southern Italy became northern Italy's "exploited colonies" but, at the same time, the culture of the south strongly influenced that of the north (Gramsci 1957: 28, 48). In fact, it was due to the internal structure of Italian colonialism that

Gramsci was able to separate these elements of power, which corre­late and stick to each other in many situations of external, overseas colonization. Revising the Marxist teaching that the economic basis determines the "superstructure," Gramscian concepts of hegemony and domination proved to be seminal for cultural and postcolonial studies. Conceived in Italy, they have been applied in India and else­where (Guha 1997).

Speculating about the relations between "power," which in her writing was close to hegemony, and violence, Hannah Arendt described the "boomerang effect" that an imperial government would bring to the mother country from the colonies if the violence against the "subject races" spread to the imperial nation, so that "the last 'subject race' would be the English themselves." Arendt suggested that some British imperial administrators (she referred to Lord Cromer) were aware of the boomerang of violence, and this "much- feared effect" constrained their actions in India or Africa (Arendt 1970: 54). With its aboriginal roots, the boomerang metaphor sum­marized the old, Kantian nightmare that the European peoples would be ruled as if they were savages who could not rule themselves. Anthropologists have repeatedly stressed the role of European colo­nies as "the laboratories of modernity," which tested the newest technologies of power (Stoler 1995: 17). When the mother countries implemented selected methods of colonial power at home, they appropriately adjusted their functions. The project of the Panopticon, which was first devised as a factory by the adventurous Brits in a Russian colony in Ukraine and later used as a prison in England and elsewhere, is a good example of this creative process (see Chapter 7).

This boomerang imagery was crucial for Arendt's major contribu­tion, Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), which surveyed the Soviet and Nazi regimes under one cover along with a variety of western colonies. Despite the long-standing fascination with Arendt's theo­retical ideas, this part of her legacy has been discussed primarily by her earliest as well as her most recent critics (Pietz 1988; Rothberg 2009; Mantena 2010). Still, with one significant exception (Boym 2010), the scholarship on Arendt's Origins focuses on its German story and downplays the massive Russian-Soviet part of this study. Indeed, Arendt's focus on the pan-Slavic movement as a step in the development of Russian and European racism was not productive for her project. The pan-Slavic movement was a dead-end; it did not lead to the Russian revolution and Soviet totalitarianism in the way that Arendt described. Arendt's idea of the boomerang effect was brilliant, but in application to Russia it needed mediation by an understanding of Russian imperialism as an internal, and not only external, affair. The long-standing traditions of violence and coercion with which the Russian Empire treated its own peasantry could explain the revolu­tion and totalitarianism as a boomerang coming home to the cities, the capitals, and the state. The revolutionary state absorbed the prac­tices and experiences that the Empire projected onto its subject peoples, including the Russians. Unlike the German boomerang that, according to Arendt, flew back across the high seas from the colonies to the heartlands, the Russian boomerang whirled through the inter­nal machinery of the empire. Totalitarianism, Soviet style, was a logical result of this effect.

Talking about the influx of race imagery from the colonies to Europe during the English and French revolutions, Michel Foucault generalized:

It should never be forgotten that while colonization . . . transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boo­merang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West. . . . A whole series of the colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling coloniza­tion, or an internal colonialism, on itself. (2003: 103)

Tashkent, but it is there that he would receive a critical experience that enabled him to "civilize" Russia. In several funny stories, the gentlemen from Tashkent beat and bribe the gentlemen in Petersburg, assuming it as a part of their civilizing mission. If you find yourself in a town that has a prison and does not have a school, you are in the heart of Tashkent, wrote the satirist. Like Major Kovalev who lost his nose when he returned from the Caucasus, the imperial returnees confront a catastrophe that they purposefully create and deeply misunderstand. Focusing on the return arc of the imperial boomerang, from the colony to the mother country, Saltykov- Shchedrin defined the internal Orient - in his terms, "Tashkent-ness" - as a combination of violence and ignorance that he discerned in the exchange between the Russian center and its colonies (Saltykov- Shchedrin 1936: 10/29-280).

Two great struggles, inconsistent but emancipatory, dominated the end of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first century: decolonization of the Third World and de-Sovietization of the Second World. Historically, these two struggles have been inter­twined. Intellectually, they have been kept separate. But starting from the age of the Enlightenment, academic history has experienced its own boomerang effect: the knowledge of the colonization and decol­onization processes in the east illuminates the understanding of the west.

Recent decades have seen a historiographical revolution that has been mostly focused on the role of the state, coercion, and war in the creation of the modern world (Tilly 1990; Bartlett 1993; Mann 1996). Michael Mann observes that in modern history, settler colo­nies of democratic countries were more murderous than the colonies of authoritarian empires. Liberal democracies were built on the back of ethnic cleansing, which took the form of institutional coercion in mother countries and of mass murder in the colonies. As long as empires were able to sustain the plural "sociospatial networks of power" in their diverse parts, they could escape massive bloodshed. With the transition to the "organic view of society," empires break into nation-states, a process which is usually accompanied by large- scale violence. New nation-states regulate their complexity by redraw­ing boundaries, organizing population transfers, and sanctioning ethnic cleansing. For Mann (2005), this is the "dark side of democ­racy," the modern heart of darkness, to use an older metaphor.

In Russia, organic nationalism started during the Napoleonic Wars and was maturing all the way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marking one of its turning points. The fact that it has never fully matured explains both the weakness of Russian democracy and the relative bloodless- ness of recent Russian transformations (Hosking 1997). Despite their defining importance for the modern world, these processes have been under-theorized. In a rare postcolonial response to the post-Soviet transformation, David Chioni Moore describes a situation that he calls "the double silence." Postcolonial experts stay silent about the former Soviet sphere and Sovietologists stay silent about postcolonial ideas. Moore gives two separate explanations to this double effect. For many postcolonial scholars, some of them Marxist-leaning, the socialist world seems a better alternative to global capitalism; they do not wish to extend their critical vision from the latter to the former. Many post-socialist scholars have cultivated their new European identities; they do not wish to compare their experience with Asian or African colleagues (Moore 2001: 115-17). Several commentators have shared Moore's surprise (Condee 2006, 2008; Buchowski 2006; Chari and Verdery 2009). Both sides suffer from the disjunction between the postcolonial and the post-socialist. This disconnect is largely responsible for the much-deplored depoliticiza- tion of postcolonial studies and for the methodological parochialism that many Russianists have lamented. The reasons for this disconnect are both political and academic. As Nancy Condee put it: "[T]he intellectual Left's silence about the Second world and the Right's anticommunist preoccupations were interrelated processes, mutually enforcing constraints" (2008: 236). I would add only that in the twenty-first century, the continuation of the Left's silence about the past and the lasting present of the Second World can be explained only by inertia.

I propose in this book to take a step back. Not only is the post- Soviet era postcolonial (though still imperial), the Soviet era was postcolonial too. The Russian Empire was a great colonial system both at its distant frontiers and in its dark heartlands. Employed by Bismarck, Lenin, and Hitler; mentioned by Weber, Foucault, and Habermas; and, with slightly different wording, developed by nine­teenth-century Russian historians (see Chapter 4), the concept of internal colonization has a deeper genealogy than is usually assumed. To be sure, extending the postcolonial edifice, which has never been very coherent, to the immense space of the Russian Empire requires not just an "application" of the pre-existing ideas, but their deep refashioning. Doing so might help us to understand not only the Russian imperial experience, but also the unused potentialities of postcolonial theory.

Worldliness

Two very different authors, Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, relied on a rare concept that they used independently of one another. This concept was "worldliness." Writing about humanity in dark times, Arendt revealed how people respond to the collapse of the public sphere by pressing up against each other, mistaking "warmth" for "light," and escaping into the worldlessness, "a form of barbarism" (1968: 13). Also writing about dark times, Said protested against the popular idea that literature has a life of its own, a life that is separate from history, politics, and other worldly matters (see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 33; Wood 2003: 3). Worldliness is important for reading Gogol, and no less so for Conrad or Kipling. But there are always many worlds on earth; during the Cold War, there were offi­cially three.

Three Worlds

Writing during the Cold War, Edward Said defined "Orientalism" as the way in which the First World has treated the Third World. In this abstract formulation, he skipped the Second World entirely. In his introduction to Orientalism (1978), Said spoke of the Cold War, "an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West," as the very first of historical circumstances that made his study pos­sible. Indeed, the idea of three worlds came into being around 1955 and expressed western anxiety about the growing appeal of the USSR among the former colonies - the penetration of the Second World into the Third (Sachs 1976; Pletsch 1981; Moore 2001). In the 1970s, the USSR was relevant enough for Said to write: "No one will have failed to note how the 'East' has always signified danger and threat . . . even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia" (1978: 26). In this beginning of Said's work, the east embraced two major entities, the traditional Orient and the non-traditional one, which was Russia. The subsequent parts of Said's book exclusively discussed relations between the west and "the traditional Orient." The non-traditional part of the east was left for further consideration.

Speaking of an Orient that stretched from the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea to those of the Indian Ocean to the Southern Pacific, i.e. along the borders of the Russian Empire, Said showed that European policies toward this part of the east were accompanied by a public focus on captured territories and their inhabitants; that knowledge about colonial peoples defined the world of those who ruled them and the ways they were governed; and that the great texts of the western tradition were not "innocent" of imperialism but persistently alluded to the colonial experience. Said attacked tradi­tional orientalism for imagining the east and the west as self-sufficient Platonic essences, which split the imperial mind into a "Manichean delirium."

Subsequent critics have corrected Said's arguments in many respects. Using British examples, David Cannadine (2001) showed that the cultural traffic between the capital and the colonies was actually reciprocal. The British who mimicked Indians and other colonials in food or spirituality comprised the rule rather than the exception. Even more importantly, Brits projected onto their subjects a presump­tion of affinity rather than difference, so that they could deal with familiar hierarchies rather than with exotic and dangerous disorder. Writing about German colonialism, Russell Berman (1998) showed that the cultural logic of orientalism changed its patterns when it worked in western empires other than the French and the British. In Berman's account, German missionaries and scholars were more attentive to the natives and did not deprive their informants of human agency to the extent that was typical of their British and French col­leagues. Orientalism was a specific cultural pattern, variable in dif­ferent situations. Homi Bhabha (1994) destabilized the Saidian opposition between the imperial masters and the colonial subjects by focusing on paradoxically creative dimensions of colonialism. With his work, cultural hybridization has made for a popular subject of postcolonial studies. While Frantz Fanon and Edward Said focused on "the Manichean opposition" between the colonized and the colo­nizers, it is the enormous "grey zones" and "middle grounds" that have become the focus of postcolonial scholarship (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Finally, Gyan Prakash has noted the connection between Said's arguments and the tripartite world map that he inherited from the Cold War. "Even as we recognize that three worlds have collapsed into a single differentiated structure, the demand for imminent criti­cism remains relevant," wrote Prakash (1996: 199).

Among European powers, the Russian Empire was distinguished by its liminal location between west and east; by a composite struc­ture that was created of western and eastern elements; and by its self-reflective culture, which accounted for creative combinations of orientalism, occidentalism, and more. It is difficult to think about this historical phenomenon in terms of Platonic ideas of east and west. For many reasons, these ideas are awkward and difficult to handle. It would be better to imagine east and west as Heraclites' elements, which are free to mix in certain, though not in any, combinations. As elements, the west and the east sometimes need one another, like fire and air; sometimes displace one another, like water and fire; and sometimes - most frequently - coexist in complex, multilayered folds, pockets, and mixtures, like water and earth.

Following Said's footsteps, I will show that some of his protago­nists, major British authors, documented their Russian fantasies or memories in a way that was simultaneously orientalist and "non- traditional," i.e. deeply different from what Said saw as the norm of western writings about the "traditional East." I will look at Defoe, Kipling, and Balfour, and leave Conrad for a separate chapter. I do not mean that similar readings can be applied to all or many of the protagonists of Said's Orientalism. But these four authors are, without doubt, important. At the end of this chapter, I will explore one source of Said's remarkable omission of Russia from his analysis.

Robinson's Sables

Robinson Crusoe was the starting point for some of Said's crucial arguments. Re-reading Daniel Defoe's groundbreaking representa­tions of the western man in an eastern land, Said explored Crusoe's attitude toward money, travel, and solitude. Like many critics before him, Said ignored the second volume of Defoe's trilogy, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). These adventures brought Robinson much farther than his proverbial island. Covering thou­sands of miles, mostly by earth, he traveled to Madagascar, China, Tartary, and Siberia, to return to England by way of Archangel. This geographical experience was very different from what he found on no man's island, and he engaged in social adventures that were totally different from his experience with Friday. In Eurasia, he negotiated with savvy eastern traders, had conflicts with his ship­mates, lost Friday, decimated a native village, established a settled colony in Madagascar, failed as a colonial administrator, made a new friend, and became rich. Entering Siberia, he felt relief, but also disappointment:

As we came nearer to Europe we should find the country better peopled, and the people more civiliz'd; but I found myself mistaken in both, for we had yet the nation of the Tongueses to pass through . . . ; as they were conquered by the Muscovites, and entirely reduc'd, they were not so dangerous, but for rudeness of manners . . . no people in the world ever went beyond them. (Defoe 1925: 310)

Taking into account Robinson's previous adventures, this was no small criticism. The horrible Tunguses particularly impressed Robinson with their furs. "They are all clothed in skins of beasts, and their houses are built of the same." As we shall see shortly, Robinson's business vision did not fail him this time. In contrast, his geography was very shaky.

Much concerned, like other travelers of his time (Wolff 1994), with the boundary between Europe and Asia, he reported that this bound­ary stretched along the Enisey river, but some pages later transferred it thousands of miles farther west, to the Kama river. In Siberia, Robinson was also interested in comparative issues:

The Czar of Muscovy has taken to have cities . . . where his soldiers keep garrisons something like the stationary soldiers plac'd by the Romans in the remotest countries of their empire, some of which I had read particularly were plac'd in Britain. . . . Wherever we came, the garrisons and governor were Russians, and professed Christians, yet the inhabitants of the country were mere pagans sacrificing to idols, and . . . the most barbarous, except only that they did not eat human flesh, as our savages in America did. (Defoe 1925: 295)

In a un-Robinsonian way, he reported his findings to "the Muscovite governors" of Siberia, who said that it was none of their business, because if the Czar expected to convert his subjects, "it should be done by sending clergymen among them, not soldiers" (Defoe 1925: 311). They added, with more sincerity than Robinson expected, "that it was not so much the concern of their monarch to make the people

Christians as to make them subjects." He also learned that Siberia was the Russian place of exile, which did not surprise this Brit. When he befriended an exiled Russian prince there, he devised a subversive plan to smuggle him to England. This Russian Friday, however, declined the offer in sublime, Puritan words:

Here I am free from the temptation of returning to my former miserable greatness; there I am not sure that all the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury . . . may revive and take root. . . . Dear sir, let me remain in this blessed confinement, banish'd from the crimes of life, rather than purchase a show of freedom, at the expense of the liberty of my reason. (Defoe 1925: 323)

Dostoevsky's characters might have said the same thing in the same part of Siberia, but their final plea would not have been to preserve "reason." Touched by both the offer and its denial, Robinson and the prince exchanged gifts. The prince gave Robinson "a very fine present of sables, too much indeed for me to accept from a man in his circumstances, and I would have avoided them, but he would not be refus'd." Robinson gave the prince "a small present of tea, and two pieces of China damask, and four little wedges of Japan gold, which . . . were far short of the value of his sables." The prince accepted the tea and one piece of gold, "but would not take any more." The next day, the prince asked Robinson to take his only son to England. The deal was excellent: with his new Friday, Robinson obtained "six or seven horses, loaded with very rich furs, and which in the whole, amounted to a very great value" (Defoe 1925: 325). And so it happened.

Rich in realistic details, this part of The Farther Adventures sends a complex moral message. The indiscriminate picture of Siberian idolatry fits the perception of Robinson as an orientalizing Puritan traveler. His condemnation of the Tsar's indifference to his Christian mission reveals Defoe's understanding of the imperial burden. The whole picture justified Robinson's plot of cheating the Russian Tsar by smuggling his exiled subject to England. But it was not only Robinson's desperate longing for human contact, another feature of his pilgrimage, which motivated his unlimited affection toward the prince. Because of the generosity of the prince and the value of the furs, their exchange was unfair, a fact that Robinson felt deeply but did not try to correct. Two times in a row, Robinson financially benefited from this friendship. The exchange of gifts in which the western side gains fabulously and unilaterally was a regular ambition of colonial projects. But in The Farther Adventures, Robinson gained not because of his intellectual superiority over the native, but because of his moral inferiority. Evidently, Defoe designed the whole exchange in such a way that the exiled Russian prince appeared not only richer but also wiser and kinder than the traveling British merchant. Able to make a distinction between freedom and liberty in perfect English, this prince was also very enlightened, an admirable quality in com­parison to Robinson's limited skills. Thrown among barbaric people, the noble prince of a higher nature represented the embodiment of a particularly Russian kind of colonialism, in which the high and the low points of human existence are pushed to the extreme, beyond the westerners' expectations. This friend was a far cry from the first volume's Friday; maybe because of this, it was the prince's son, not the prince, who took Friday's place in Robinson's retinue.

Judging Robinson solely on the basis of the first volume of his travels, Said performed an erasure that has been typical of modern readings of Crusoe, who have presented Crusoe as the model and prototype of Puritan orientalism. As Melissa Free (2006) argues in her illuminating essay, this erasure was uncommon among the early readers of Defoe but became increasingly popular in the twentieth century. In her extraordinary statistics from more than 1,000 editions of Crusoe in English, Free demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, these editions usually consisted of just the first two or all three of the volumes, with only 4 percent containing the first volume alone. In the nineteenth century, the separate publications of the first volume increased only slightly. But after World War I, more than 75 percent of the editions of Crusoe consisted of the first volume only. The story, which resulted in more commerce than any colonial cargo, was sim­plified by abridgement. The fur-clad Russian prince was sacrificed in preference to the naked Friday. Robinson in Siberia was not oriental­ist enough, or rather not in the proper way, to deserve reading.

Kipling's Bear

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1889. But of course they have met myriad times and Kipling, though often misquoted, knew it well: "But there is neither East nor West. . . . When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!" (Kipling 1925: 231). By focusing on relations between the First World and the Third, post- colonial studies have too literally followed the initial line of Kipling's

Ballad and missed its deconstructive flow. However, in the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, which Kipling explored in Kim, three rather than two elements fight a sort of mili­tarized dialectics: England, India, and, in the background, vicious Russia. The Game pushed India to the west and Russia to the east, a complex geopolitics that Kipling situated in the continuum that spans and curves around the globe. An Irish boy and British spy in India, Kim works against the Russian penetration there in a spirit that is more reminiscent of the future Cold War rather than of India's struggle.

In a later poem, "Truce of the Bear" (1898), Kipling presented a pathetic beggar who tells the story of his fight with a horrible beast, "the Bear that stands like a Man." The fight, if there was any, took place 50 years earlier than the story, but the beggar keeps repeating it as the central event of his life. He describes the bear as "the

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monstrous, pleading thing." However, the bear is not unknown; the opposite is true: "I knew his times and his seasons, as he knew mine. . . .I knew his strength and cunning, as he knew mine." When he met this bear 50 years earlier, the hunter had pity on him and did not shoot. In response, the bear ripped his face away. Now, the former hunter asks for money in exchange for demonstrating his wounds. "Over and over the story, ending as he began: / 'There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!' " Though Russia is not mentioned in the poem, generations of readers have perceived this bear as the symbol of Russia, and the poem as a call to Britain to make no truce with this rival. In 1919, an author of the Atlantic Magazine praised Kipling for his "remarkable rightness." After the revolution in Russia, the wartime alliance seemed to her like a bad idea, a Truce of the Bear. To this author, "the Russians were behaving very much, and very vividly, like 'the bear that looks like a man.' " She testified to the fact that Kipling's Russophobia was unpopular before and during the war: "The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in these last years; and Kipling's laughter at that phenomenon must have been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right, it would prove them so remarkably wrong" (Gerould 1919).

But Kipling's construction is more subtle. While Matun, the nar­rator, "Eyeless, noseless, and lipless - toothless, broken of speech," does not look like a Man, Adam-zad, the bear, "Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer," does. This resemblance between the Bear and the Man repeats as the central line of the poem; they are like twins who are engaged in an eternal, open-ended fight. Once again, we need to return to the very start of the poem to realize that the narrator is not white; he is bandaged. "[H]e follows our white men in / Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin" (Kipling 1925: 271-3). The duel and the truce were struck between the Indian man and the Russian bear. As in Kim, the con­struction is triangular, not linear. Like Gogol's "The Nose," this poem turns into doubles what cannot possibly be similar: the whole and the part, the man and the beast, "less than one and double."

Throughout the age of empires, Britain increasingly saw its adver­sary in Russia. In the time of Kipling, both empires debated the pos­sibility of a Russian attack on India, which was alternatively perceived as revenge for the defeat in the Crimea and as a threat to British rule in Asia. First used by the Brits in 1840, the term "Great Game" referred to their civilizing mission in Central Asia, but the meaning shifted to the zero-sum game when Russia expanded into the region (Yapp 1987; Hopkirk 1996). In 1879, a certain A. Dekhnewallah published a pamphlet, The Great Russian Invasion of India, which described a future war between the two empires. Advancing through Afghanistan, Russian troops occupy the Punjab and Central prov­inces. Their attack is well prepared by the numerous spies who provoke mutiny among lower castes. British India is saved by an artillery officer, "a quiet man with large dreamy eyes," who with­draws the troops to Kashmir and organizes cunning attacks on the invaders. Finally, the British send navy expeditions into the Black Sea and the Baltic, forcing the Russians to purchase peace at the expense of giving up Afghanistan and Persia (Dekhnewallah 1879: 43, 66). The war of the future was imagined by analogy with the war of the past, the Crimean campaign.

"The Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in," stated Kipling in the amazing story, "The Man Who Was" (1889). A British regiment in north India hosts a certain Dirkovitch, "a Russian of the Russians, as he said." A Cossack officer and a journalist writing for a newspaper "with a name that was never twice the same," Dirkovitch is evidently a spy. But the Brits treat him with respect: he has done "rough work in Central Asia" and has seen more "help-yourself fighting than most men of his years." With his bad English, this Cossack tries to refresh the idea of the civilizing mission for the White Hussars:

He remained distressingly European through it all. . . . He would unburden himself by the hour on the glorious future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia when . . . the great mission of civilizing Asia should begin. That was unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old. You cannot reform a lady of many lovers. (Kipling 1952: 29)

Denying the orientals' ability to rule themselves as Brits do, the nar­rator, one of the White Hussars, holds no illusions about the Russian's sincerity: Dirkovitch knew the hopelessness of changing Asia "as well as any one else." The White Guards recognize this Russian in a racial way that is meaningful for them; although an Indian officer, their ally, cannot not join them at table and knows it, Dirkovitch is able to spend his evenings with the Brits; moreover, he proves his ability to drink more brandy than any of them. But suddenly, a weird figure appears in the living room: The Man Who Was, a miserable Afghan who speaks English and Russian. He turns out to be a former officer of this very regiment, whom the Russians captured in the Crimea and sent to Siberia; decades later, beaten and pathetic, he has found his way back to his regiment, "like a homing pigeon." He cringes before the Cossack who espouses an unclear threat: "He was just one little - oh, so little - accident, that no one remembered. Now he is That. So will you be, brother-soldiers so brave - so will you. But you will never come back." The Man Who Was dies three days later. As Dirkovitch departs, the smartest of his British friends murmurs, "A terrible spree there's sure to be when he comes back again." The theme of coming back is central for the story. British troops in India were expecting the return of the experience of the Crimean War. Having read the story to the end, we inevitably go back to the beginning:

Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of Western peoples, instead of the most westerly of Eastern, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up next. (Kipling 1952: 28)[3]

Kipling's contemporary, George Nathaniel Curzon, visited Russia before his appointment as Vice-Roy of India (1898-1905). In his first book, which happened to be his Russian travelogue, he wrote, "Upon no question there is greater conflict of opinion in England than Russia's alleged designs upon India." Based on his experience of traveling to Russia, he felt this split internally: "Every Englishman enters Russia as a Russophobe and leaves it a Russofile" (Curzon 1889: 11, 20). No doubt an overgeneralization, this early version of a "from Russia with love" story speaks volumes about the British attitude toward Russia. Having entered and left Russia, Curzon was still anxious about the Russian threat: "Russia is as much compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun," he wrote. But on the other hand, the Russian advance in Asia would just be "a con­quest of Orientals by Orientals" and therefore acceptable (Curzon 1889: 319, 372). As Foreign Secretary (1919-24), Curzon drew a line between revolutionary Russia and the newly independent Poland, which many decades later materialized as the border of the European Union. For all practical purposes, the Curzon line is still dividing the world into the west and the east.

To the revolution in Russia, Kipling responded with the poem, "Russia to the Pacifists." His unexpected mourning for the Russian Empire reflected his anxiety that the distant tragedy would repeat at home: "So do we bury a Nation dead / And who shall be next to fall?" It turned out to be another version of the boomerang story: "We go to dig a nation's grave as great as England was" (Kipling 1925: 274-5).

Balfour's Declaration

According to Said, orientalism was a form of thought and of action, and the two were cyclically connected. The politics created the knowl­edge, which, in its own turn, guided the behavior of the colonizers and directed their scholarship. One of Said's initial examples was the ideas and policies of the early twentieth-century British statesman Arthur James Balfour, who in 1917 laid the foundation for the Jewish migration to Palestine. Said declared that Balfour's "argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was clear. . . . There were Westerners, and there were Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated." The double doctrine of western power and orientalist knowledge was based on the "absolute demarcation between East and West." These two categories, of east and west, were "both the starting and the end points of analysis." Their "polar distinction," "binary opposition," or "radical difference" secured the "streamline and effective" operations that Said ascribes to Balfour's type of ori­entalism. In Balfour's mind "the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western"; Said calls it "to polarize the distinction." To Balfour, " ' Orientals' for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence" (Said 1978: 36-45).

A Platonic essence cannot change, expand, or polarize. It cannot merge with other essences. Finally, it cannot be aware of itself. No doubt, Balfour deserved much of this criticism. In 1917, he told his colleagues in the Cabinet that since "East is East and West is West," they should not use the idea of self-governance when they are talking about places like India. Even in the west, said Balfour, parliamentary institutions had rarely been a great success, "except among the English-speaking people." Curzon found this statement, which could have come straight from an ironical Kipling story, "very reactionary" (Gilmour 1994: 485). Responding to the events that were triggered by the revolution in Russia, Balfour projected his orientalism not only onto Indians and Arabs, but onto Jews as well, especially Russian Jews. When Balfour met the aspiring Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1906, he asked this Belarusian Jew whether his people would go to Uganda rather than to Palestine. Weizmann responded with a question: "Mr Balfour, supposing I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" Balfour said, "But Dr Weizmann, we have London." "That is true," Weizmann said, "but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh." Instead of questioning this concept of "we," Balfour asked, "Are there many Jews who think like you?" To this Weizmann said, "I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves" (Weizmann 1949: 144).

Meeting in Manchester, the statesman and the immigrant discussed oriental places such as Uganda, Palestine, and the Pale. Born in the village of Motol, near Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, Weizmann seemed exotic to Balfour. Of course, Balfour knew how to talk to orientals and his questions were exacting; but Weizmann also knew his game. He conversed with Balfour not just as a member of a foreign tribe, but as a representative of a people who were unknown and unseen, a people who could not speak for themselves. A decade later, as Foreign Secretary, Balfour passed Weizmann his famous Declaration that conveyed British "sympathy" for Zionist aspirations and established "a national home" for the Jews in Palestine. It was not the state, though. Often criticized and rarely understood, Balfour was pursuing the policy by analogy: the Russian Pale of settlement was not a state, either. The stateless Jews from the old, by then destroyed, Pale of the Russian Empire were moving to the newly drawn Pale of the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration was signed on November 2, 1917, five days before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It had a double purpose, to create a British protectorate for Jews in Palestine and to discharge the explosive situation in Russia, where the Bolsheviks, many of them Jews, were contemplating a separate peace with the Germans.

It so happened that Weizmann became a dear friend of Balfour, a distant analogue of Robinson's Russian prince. Balfour's practices and theories were essentialist, but they changed over the decades. His "orientals" included Weizmann from Pinsk and the Mufti of Jerusalem, both of whom were important for British politics in Palestine. British policies toward the east, including Eastern Europe, also changed dramatically. Dividing the vastly different orientals and mediating between them in the name of the Empire, Balfour's east was not really a world of Platonic essences. It was, rather, a Wittgensteinian constellation of images, people, and places that had little in common but their perceived distance from Trinity College, Cambridge, where Balfour received his Law degree.

If for Kipling, Russia was a mythical enemy that had always threat­ened but never penetrated his India, Joseph Conrad was still living after this event actually happened to his Poland. Russian colonization was the site of the catastrophe, accomplished or anticipated - the crime of partition, the truce of the bear. I find it amazing that Edward Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) all but ignored Conrad's tortured relation to the Russian Empire, which was central both to his fiction and to his autobiography(see Chapter 11). An enthralled critic of Balfour and Curzon, Kipling and Conrad, Said took no notice of their obsessions with Russia. By doing so, he reduced their multipolar worldliness to the one-dimensional concept of traditional orientalism.

An Uncle's Lesson

There was no Second World in Said's universe. One of the reasons becomes clear from his memoirs, which present an unexpectedly lonely, apolitical portrait of his youth. Protected from real life by the wealth of his father and the warmth of his mother, Edward was awakened by the Egyptian revolution of 1952. As a result of the coup, Edward's father lost a large part of his business, and his mother became an ardent supporter of the militant and increasingly pro- Soviet leader of the revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Edward, then aged 17, became involved in the family debates, the Cold War in miniature. His sympathies were with his Nasserite mother, though he sometimes disagreed with her "socialist pan-Arabism" (Said 1999: 264). The opposite pole, however, was embodied not by his father who was busy restoring his business, but by a relative, Charles Malik, the husband of an aunt.

A philosopher who studied with Heidegger and a statesman who wrote the Declaration of Human Rights together with Eleanor

Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Edward Said could have been among these children.

Source: http://www.chahadatouna.com/2006/2006-12/Dr. %20Charles %20Malik/Dr%20Charles%20Malik%20Bio.htm

Roosevelt, Malik was an outstanding figure. The Lebanese Ambassador to the US, he also served as the country's Foreign Minister and later, at the end of the 1950s, as President of the United Nations General Assembly. "Polarizing" and "charismatic," as Said depicted him, but also cosmopolitan and visionary, Malik was a true Cold War warrior. Among many subjects of his speeches and pamphlets, the most salient subject was anti-communism.

The young Edward Said was initially attracted to his famous rela­tive, but later found him "troubling." Ascribing to the Soviet Union "the missionary fervor and the imperialist vision," Malik warned the free world of the threat of enslavement. However, when in 1960 he shared a podium with the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, Malik chose to espouse his dream of the peaceful disintegration of communism from within. He saw "infinite possibilities, short of war," to help this happen (Teller and Malik 1960). He hated "neu­tralism" and eagerly operated with the concepts of west and east.

Devoting pages to the philosophical analysis of their relations, he saw two forces, Soviet Communism and Islam, occupying two "interme­diary" and "inauthentic" positions between east and west. A Lebanese Christian, Malik distrusted them both, but his passions were focused on the Soviets. "Communism is almost infinitely resourceful in poi­soning any normal relationship between East and West," wrote Malik (1953) during the Egyptian revolution. Around this time, Said learned from Malik "about the clash of civilizations, the war between West and East, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions." Said's distrust is clear in these words, but the inten­sity and longevity of his struggle against Malik's influence needed another passage: "I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life." For the last three decades, wrote Said in 1999, he was still living through Malik's "lesson," analyzing it "over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment" (Said 1999: 264-5).

For many Third World intellectuals, the Soviet Union was an inspi­ration and a model; for some, it was also a source of support. The most notable thinkers of the radical Left took part in the emancipa­tion efforts that were led, and sometimes manipulated, by the Soviet Union. The fate of the American John Reed, a participant of the Bolshevik Revolution who died in 1920 in Moscow after taking part in the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, illustrates this early twentieth-century convergence between communism and anti- imperialism. The lives and works of Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Jean-Paul Sartre give further, intellectually more signifi­cant, examples. But as the Soviet Union shaped itself into a major imperialist power that competed with other global powers, the free- minded Marxist-leaning intellectuals found themselves deprived of their mental tools. There is a disturbing split between the ways in which many twentieth-century thinkers understood two major devel­opments of the period, decolonization and the collapse of the impe­rialist order on the one hand, and the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist order, on the other.

Said's oeuvre features the same partial worldliness, which omits the Second World as a nuisance. If, for those who believed in "mod­ernization theory," the Second World did not seem much different from the Third World because both were just steps in the moderniza­tion process that led to the First World, then postcolonial critics performed the opposite operation. In their minds, the Second World was not much different from the First World because they both failed to support the Third World. This indifference calcified after fellow-travelers of the Soviet regime watched its collapse, with their hopes betrayed and their respect having turned to contempt. However, Said was never a Soviet fellow-traveler. His memories of his early debates with his mother, the supporter of Nasser, could signal his lifelong disavowal of the pro-Soviet ideas that were popular in his circle. He was trying to find his own, creative way, one that would ignore Nasser and Malik alike. But then not only the Nasserian regime but the Soviet Union also collapsed. Were Malik still alive in 1991, he could have celebrated the triumph of his prediction about the non-violent demise of the socialist system from within. Said had nothing to say about this and subsequent events in the Second World; to comment on them would have amounted to agreeing with his uncle.

However, in one of his last books, Said experimented with a closer look at Eastern Europe. In Freud and the Non-European (2003), Said appreciated Freud's reading of Moses, the founder of Judaism, as a non-Jewish Egyptian. Said was right to emphasize Freud's interest in the Orient, but Freud was equally involved in the "non-traditional" east. A subtler analysis would have shown that in Freud's circle, German and Austrian Jews viewed the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe with stereotypes that were similar to Said's portrait of orien­talism. Freud's clientele in Vienna was largely composed of East European Jews (Etkind 1997). As with his Moses, Freud did not trade in stereotypes.

Said's wonderful book on Freud ends in the most unexpected way, with a tribute to Isaac Deutscher, "a non-Jewish Jew," a Polish Trotskyite who became a British critic of both Stalinism and Zionism. Freud chose Moses, Said chose Deutscher: two non-Zionist Jews, non-Western Europeans, betrayed revolutionaries, adopted founders. It was an extraordinary choice that showed Said's late, mature inter­est in the Second World.

Part II

Writing from Scratch

Chasing Rurik

Ascribed to a twelfth-century monk, Nestor, the Primary Chronicle narrates a moment from the ninth century, when some northern tribes failed to settle their disputes and invited a Varangian, named Rurik, to bring order to their "plentiful land." Rurik's name was given to the first Russian dynasty, the Rurukides, which preceded the Romanovs and ruled for twice as long. "The Origin is a silent zero point, locked within itself," writes Edward Said; an Origin, or rather a myth of origin, "centrally dominates what derives from it" (Said 1985: 318, 372). But in modern Russian, "to start from Rurik" means to engage in boring and irrelevant talk, to refer to origins instead of confronting problems. Already in 1841, the critic Vissarion Belinsky complained that the debates about Rurik were "bringing boredom and sadness to the thinking public" (1954: 5/94). In this chapter, I will re-visit the debate on Rurik in the context of Michel Foucault's course on French historiography (2003), a remarkable and controversial model.

Inviting Leviathan

In 1818, having read what was the newest version of the Rurik story, General Mikhail Orlov, a hero of the war with Napoleon and a future rebel and exile, wrote to a friend:

I am reading Karamzin. His first volume is not to my liking. . . . Why no passion for the Fatherland? Why does he want to be an impassionate cosmopolite rather than a citizen? . . . Why does he say that Rurik was a foreigner? That Varangians were not Slavs? What does he find

praiseworthy in the call to the foreigner to take the seat of Novgorod?

(Cited in Maiofis 2008: 344)

Like the building of the Russian Empire, the writing of its history was an international project, frequently contested by the emerging Russian nationalism. Nationalisms embodied themselves in history books as well as in novels and newspapers. Part of "print capitalism" but perceived as truth rather than fiction, history books shaped the body of the nation despite the permanent revisions of them and con­tradictions among them (Anderson 1991; Hroch 1985). Generations of Russians read about Rurik while Russia was fighting with its enemies. In times of peace, they pursued historical studies because of their patriotic desire to learn more about their country. In their classes or textbooks, there was no place to start but with Rurik the Varangian. Who was he, who were they? The ethnicity of Rurik was discussed fervently, while other aspects of his story were largely ignored.

Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov, Rurik's Arrival at Ladoga, 1909. Three brothers, Rurik, Truvor, and Sineus (which in Russian means the blue moustaches) are receiving "gifts" of fur from a Slavic tribe. Source: http://www.vasnecov.ru/

The first Russian author to publish the Primary Chronicle was Vasilii Tatishchev (1686-1750), a lay historian and high official of the emerging empire, a fascinating and unreliable author (Tolochko 2005). Peter the Great asked him to map his imperial domains, but Tatishchev slipped from geography to history. He created mines in the Urals and suppressed the Old-Believers there, "tamed" the Kalmyks on the Volga and the Kyrgyzes in the southern steppes, and governed the crucial province of Astrakhan, the gateway to the east. Digging in archives was like digging in mines, and writing history was like forging metal; both industries were instrumental for the Empire. Almost 200 years later, Pavel Miliukov, an academic histo­rian who helped to dethrone the second dynasty and set himself up as Foreign Minister during World War I, admitted that this eigh­teenth-century way of doing history was closer to him than the posi- tivist tradition that lay in between (Miliukov 2006: 35).

Tatishchev's life and work were parallel to those of his French contemporary, a royal historian Henri de Boulainvilliers, who received a focused attention from both Arendt (1970) and Foucault (2003). Like Boulainvilliers, Tatishchev lived in a time of wars and served his monarch in many ways, including history writing. Three major wars between Sweden and Russia punctuated his lifetime, one a failure and two ending in Russian victories. During the truce, Tatishchev went for two years to Sweden, where he explored the mining industry and carried out intelligence work. Tatishchev's rule in the Urals, where he had to enserf the local peasants to make them work in his factories, was notoriously violent. Like Boulainvilliers, who is cred­ited with the scholarly elaboration of the right of conquest, Tatishchev liked the idea that the Russian state was founded by conquest. However, the idea that the conquerors were the ancestors of Russia's current enemy made him uncomfortable: "The arrival of Rurik with his Varangians humiliated the kinship and language of Slavs" (Tatishchev 1994: 1/344). Some consolation was found in the idea that the incoming Vikings were all male and therefore, their descendants were "quickly" Slavonized. It might be true with the Rurikides but the Romanovs invariably married into the Baltic peoples, undoing the previous Russification. After much doubt, Tatishchev concluded that the Vikings came to northern Russia from Finland rather than Sweden. Since parts of Finland had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1721 and again in 1743, locating Rurik's point of departure in Finland domesticated him into a Russian subject. In response, Tatishchev's nemesis, the German historian August Schlozer who worked in St. Petersburg and Gottingen, said plainly but a little maliciously that the Varangians were Swedes (1809: 2/430).

For Russian readers of the Primary Chronicle, it was no easier to accept the idea that Rurik was a Swede than for the readers of the Bible to agree that Moses was an Egyptian. During the early years of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, an unusual debate on this issue animated its halls (Rogger 1960; Obolensky 1982). Starting with the Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian scholars derived the Varangians from the Prussians, Lithuanians, Baltic Slavs, and even the Judaic Khazars. Catherine the Great wrote a play in the style of Shakespeare, "A Historical Scene from the Life of Rurik," and also the monumental Notes on Russian History, which showed Rurik as a Finnish Prince, a son of the King of Finland, though no such royalty existed, as Catherine well knew (Ekaterina II 1990: 145; 2008: 44). The Slavic elders summon Rurik after he has returned from a suc­cessful expedition to France: those who created France and those who created Russia were of one kin, states Catherine. But she also imag­ines a Slav rebel who does not recognize Rurik as the ruler (Wachtel 1994: 26).

In the early nineteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin found a semantic solution to the question of the Varangians in calling them Normans. An early source identified visitors to Constantinople, who came from "Rus," as the Normans (Vasil'ev 1946; Franklin and Shepard 1996). More importantly, by equating the Varangians with the Normans, Karamzin equated Russians with other Europeans who had also been dominated by the Normans in the past. A competing school of thought called itself "anti-Normanist." Schlozer wrote, early and prophetically:

I do not know of another example among the educated nations in which the science of national history would have such a strange pace. Everywhere it has been moving ahead .. . but here [in Russia] it has been returning to the very start, and more than once. (Schlozer 1809: 2/391)

Tatishchev and the Amazons

But the story of Rurik is gentle, even "idyllic" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/140). It does read as if the Vikings and the Slavic-Finnish tribes struck some kind of voluntary agreement. One part said to another, come and reign over us. The other part surely asked, is your land rich enough? But Rurik is a foreigner, someone in the crowd must have said. Retelling the story for the first time, Tatishchev had to believe that, first, in order to establish civil peace, a tribe needs a sovereign, and second, that it does not really matter where this sov­ereign comes from: from within the tribe or from the outside. While the former idea was espoused by Thomas Hobbes and in the eigh­teenth century had become the mainstream philosophical wisdom, the latter was unusual.

For Tatishchev as much as for us (or even more so), the Primary Chronicle's story of the Varangians reads like a paraphrase from Hobbes's Leviathtan: "There was no law among them, but . . . they began to war one against another," until they said to themselves, "Let us seek a prince who may rule over us" (Laurentian Text 1953: 61). In Tatishchev's time, Hobbes's ideas reached Russia through the work of Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94), a prominent German philoso­pher who worked most of his life for Russia's enemy, Sweden. But the nature of his teachings made them fit for import. Writing after the peace of Westphalia, Pufendorf made state security central among political values, the common measure for the ruler and the ruled. Only that sovereign who promises and delivers protection to his subjects can be legitimate. Only those subjects who are loyal to the sovereign are worthy of protection.

In Russia as in German lands in the late eighteenth century, debates on Pufendorf provided shelter for discussions of Hobbes (Kempe 2007). This is how Pufendorf rendered the central idea of Leviathan:

Whilst I voluntarily subject myself to the prince, I promise obedience and engage his protection; on the other hand, the prince who receives me as a subject, promiseth his protection, and engageth my obedi­ence. . . . They who create a sovereign, therefore, at the same time promise whatever the nature of subjection requires. . . . And what can we call this but the entering into covenant? (Pufendorf 2002: 595)

This is a version of Hobbes's argument that the sovereign's violence is justified because, in its absence, the unruly subjects would foment even greater violence. In Pufendorf, this idea acquires an active, dra­matized form. Subjects "create a sovereign" by exchanging "prom­ises" and negotiating these promises in vivo. This exchange is precisely what the Primary Chronicle attributes to the Slavs and the Varangians. As in Pufendorf, the Slavs promise obedience to the Varangians, who reciprocate by promising them protection. The conquerors' need to convert their conquest into contract is well recognized in postcolonial studies. A historian of India, Ranajit Guha, explains:

The conquistador must . . . move forward from the Augenblick of his flashing sword to history, from instantaneous violence to law. . . . And the moment he does so he ceases to be conqueror and sets himself up as ruler, although the habits of thought and speech may still continue to designate him by the terms of his erstwhile project. (Guha 1998: 86)

In a theoretical chapter of his Russian History, Tatishchev referred to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Wolff, and Pufendorf. He admired Christian Wolff more than the others, but only Pufendorf was avail­able in Russian translation and Tatishchev relied on him. Peter the Great personally commissioned this translation, which was published in Russian in 1724. Adjusting Hobbes's system to the post-Westpha- lian world, Pufendorf purged it of any reference to the divinity or other ideas that Catholics and Protestants would understand differ­ently (Hunter 2001). To end the war of religions meant to develop a system of peace that made religions irrelevant. Now, the Orthodox could also accept it.

Tatishchev began his own political philosophy not with Hobbes's "war of all against all," which is a collective experience, but with the idea of a solitary man. By himself, man is helpless; he cannot obtain "pleasure, peace, or profit." Therefore, he creates civil unions "natu­rally." The first exemplary union is marriage. It is based on a free choice but after the parts sign a contract, they cannot break it and each part can force the other to follow the contract. The same is true of the state, said Tatishchev. In the family, men "naturally" dominate women and children; this is also the foundation of a monarchy, because "the monarch is the father and his subjects are children" (1994: 1/359).

In Tatishchev, a patriarchal philosophy coexisted with a fantastic history. He claimed that the Slavs originated from the Amazons, the female warriors whom Herodotus connected to the Scythians. Tatishchev argued that in ancient times, the Amazons came from Africa to the banks of the Volga and there became the Slavic tribes. He attributed this discovery to Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Novgorod and one of the closest associates of Peter I, and gave a specific date, 1724, when Feofan supposedly presented this idea to Peter I. These amazing Amazons, the great-grandmothers of Russians, played a peculiar role in Tatishchev's historical imagination. In line with his idea of marriage as the paradigm for contract relations, he assumed the contract between the Vikings and the Slavs was a mar­riage in which the Vikings played the masculine role and the Slavs the feminine role. That is why the Russians, having originated from the Amazons and the Vikings, were good warriors. Later, Catherine the Great created a cult of Amazons that included an "Amazon" outfit, an "Amazon" way of riding horseback and an "Amazon" regiment of female warriors, the wives of local gentry who greeted Catherine in the Crimea (Zorin 2001; Proskurina 2006). Catherine even told Diderot that in St. Petersburg she was missing "the first Russians," the Varangians (Diderot 1992: 123).

An elaborate speculation on the Amazons and the marriage model of the state helped Tatishchev to reconcile Rurik with Hobbes and Pufendorf. Famously, Hobbes distinguished between two types of Commonwealth, by Institution and by Acquisition. The former comes from a voluntary agreement among the insiders, the latter is imposed by force of war onto the outsiders. Both are based on fear, and the rights of sovereignty are the same in both. The terror of an occupa­tion by foreigners helped Hobbes to explain the horrifying methods of the sovereign power. At the same time, this equation allowed him to neutralize the legacy of the Norman Conquest, which was still significant in the England of his time. "Leviathan's invisible adversary is the Conquest," wrote Foucault (2003: 98). Tatishchev knew the logic of Leviathan well enough to feel a similar pacifying intention in the Chronicle. The voluntary invitation of a foreign sovereign would combine both types of Commonwealth. The agreement is voluntary but the contractor is foreign. This combination neutralized the racial model of the Russian state as the domination of the Viking Rurikides over the enslaved Slavs. There were two ways to develop this logic. One, which was probed by later historians, was to reduce the difference between the counterparts (Varangians, Slavs, and Finns) and present the situation as a multiethnic commonwealth that was electing its sovereign in consensus. Tatishchev chose the opposite and more complex solution, exaggerating the distance between the Vikings and the Slavs by way of his gender metaphors and the mar­riage model.

Schlozer was skeptical about this peaceful picture. Asking himself and the reader what the Russian north looked like in the year 800, he relied on the colonial experience that his contemporaries obtained overseas. It was "a little bit like Siberia, California, Madagascar," said Schlozer; "the Enlightenment that the Normans brought to the Russian desert was not better than what the Cossacks brought to the Kamchadals some 120 years ago" (Schlozer 1809: 1/419-20; 2/180; Miliukov 2006: 142). From reports by Georg Wilhelm Steller, who explored Kamchatka in 1740, Schlozer knew that the Russian con­quest was one of the bloodiest in colonial history. In just 40 years the population of the vast land had shrunk to one-fifteenth of what it was before the Russians arrived. Foreign to Russian nationalist sentiment, Schlozer applied the idea of colonization to the very origins of Russian history. Russia was an exotic, deserted land that was colo­nized by the Vikings.

Remembered in Russia mainly as Normanists, Schlozer and his one-time patron, Gerhard Friedrich Muller, were also the founders of the discipline that has become known as ethnology. The new eth­nological discourse came out of the clash between the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and the actual diversity of peoples of the Russian Empire, which resonated with the diversity and desolation of German lands after the peace of Westphalia (Vermeulen 2006, 2008). Later, two Prussians, Kant and Herder, ignored the Russian- based contributions of Muller and Schlozer. Though Herder's philo­sophical writings defined the future of anthropology, in Russia an influential trend in history, classical studies, and education drew its roots from "the great Schlozer." Preparing his ill-fated academic career as a professor of history, in 1832 Gogol wrote a fascinating essay, "Schlozer, Muller, and Herder," which portrayed these three as "the great architects of universal history." Attributing to Schlozer the gift of throwing lightning bolts, Gogol preferred him to the other two, and to Kant as well:

Schlozer was the first to feel history as one great whole. . . . His writing was like the lightning that illuminates objects almost at once. . . . He destroyed his enemies with one word of thunder. . . . Schlozer's genius had to be in opposition. . . . Him, rather than Kant, it is fair to call all-destructive. (Gogol 1984: 6/88-9)

After the end of Seven Years War (see Chapter 9), Schlozer returned to Germany. He developed "universal history" and social statistics in Gottingen; he was also a prolific journalist, one of the creators of the pan-German public sphere. He wrote Nestor before any comparable edition of a German chronicle was produced; for his analysis of the Russian chronicles, he appropriated the Protestant methods of critical reading of the New Testament (Butterfield 1955: 56). He also wrote a study of the north, from Iceland to Kamchatka. Following Pufendorf, he was one of the first to distinguish between the state and the people. He originated the term ethnography and, starting in 1772, exchanged hostile reviews with Herder, who disliked the word (Stagl 1995).

Within Nestor and on a broader scale of lifelong scholarship, Schlozer made pioneering use of the epistemological boomerang, an interpre­tative method that applies colonial knowledge to the understanding of metropolitan societies.

Uvarov and the Black Athena

In 1812, Sergei Uvarov, a career official as well as a self-trained clas­sicist, applied the concept of colonization to the emergence of ancient Greece:

It is probable that, of all the European countries, Greece was the first peopled by Asiatic colonies. . . . We know that Greece, peopled by Asian colonists, was subjugated in turn by races of men different among themselves, but of one common origin. These new colonies brought with them the elements of their religious worship. . . . The Egyptian and Phoenician colonies imported into Greece, with their religious modes of faith, their languages and their traditions. (Uvarov 1817: 73-4)

Uvarov had studied in Gottingen with Schlozer in 1801-3. The idea that ancient Greece produced myriads of Mediterranean colonies had been well established in classicist scholarship. However, Uvarov made a deeper and more radical claim, that ancient Greece was itself the result of colonization. Two oriental peoples, Egyptians and Phoenicians, invaded Greek lands in several waves and mixed with the local population, which Uvarov identified with the Pelasgians. He also learned from Schlozer, who was the first to describe the Semitic language family, that Egyptians and Phoenicians were "of one common origin." To name these processes, Uvarov used the term "colonization" extensively and with no sign of hesitation or novelty. He saw the analogy between the colonial situation that he described as the emergence of Greece, and the colonial situation that Schlozer described as the emergence of Russia; recent studies also indicate this analogy between Hellenistic and Russian colonization (Malkin 2004). Under Uvarov's influence, Schlozer's historiography became mainstream reading in the empire. In 1804, Alexander I ennobled Schlozer and gave him a coat of arms with Nestor, the legendary author of the Primary Chronicle, in the center (Kliuchevsky 1956: 8/448).

Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov between an Oriental tablecloth and a Classical column. Portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815), in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Later, Uvarov published a proposal for the setting up of an Academy of Asian Studies in St. Petersburg (Whittaker 1984; Maiofis 2008). "It is to Asia that we owe the foundations of the great edifice of human civilization," wrote Uvarov (1810); studying and enlightening continental Asia is Russia's task, its civilizing mission. The German linguist Julius Klaproth, who had just returned from a trip to Mongolia and the Caucasus, helped Uvarov in this venture (Benes 2004). In 1932, the Soviet scholar and former Orthodox priest, Sergei Durylin, interpreted Uvarov's project as if he had just read Foucault: "With Napoleon or against Napoleon, with England or against England, Russia had to know its own and the neighboring East in order to reign over it: this is the idea of the Asian Academy" (Durylin 1932: 191). Forging an illustrious career, Uvarov became President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1818), an organizer of St. Petersburg Imperial University (1819), and Minister of the People's Enlightenment (1833-49). Seeing his role as the promotion of the ancient languages and classical education, he described Greece using the historical con­cepts that he had acquired in Russia and understood Russia in terms that he had learned from classical scholarship. Colonized and colo­nizing, both countries had much to share.

Uvarov's ideas matured in the international Romantic circles that - as Edward Said (1978: 98) told us with irony - were fascinated with "nations, races, minds, and peoples as things one could talk about passionately - in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder." In 1813, when Russian troops were fighting all over Europe, Uvarov composed a plan for perpetual peace. Referring to Hobbes, the abbe de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant, whose projects of perpetual peace he knew but deemed out­dated, Uvarov singled out one new idea that could provide a purpose for the postwar world. The idea was the colonization of the east, a sublime project that would keep the victors in business well after the war. Nations perform their noblest deeds after long and bloody con­flicts, declared Uvarov. The war with Napoleon was large and its outcome, peace, would be proportional. Uvarov's Eurocentric project amounted to a project of colonization so large that it would be proper to call it, globalization. "The world is still spacious. . . . One half of the earth consists of deserts, of wild lands and . . . of barbarian societ­ies. Powerful states will create a new world," wrote Uvarov (cited in Maiofis 2008: 78).

An alliance between two empires, the Russian and the British, was crucial for this project of global imperialism. But Great Britain sus­pected Alexander I of plans to create a world empire, declined to take part in the Holy Alliance of 1815, and prevented Russia from taking Greece from the Ottomans. Uvarov's idea of perpetual peace and his historical analogy between Russia and Greece became dated. In his correspondence with the highest authority among his contem­poraries, Goethe, Uvarov reformulated the role of Russia as "the new Egypt" rather than Greece - not the "center" of the modern world but rather the "bridge" between its two separate halves, the east and the west. Like a bridge, Egyptians brought Asian culture to Greece and Europe; Russia should play the same role between Europe and Asia (Durylin 1932: 202). Three worlds were clearly on Uvarov's map, - the First World, Europe; the Third World, Asia; and the Second World, Russia. The new Egypt, Russia, would bring civilization to Asia in the same way as historical Egypt had brought it to Greece.

Beginning in 1987, the Sinologist Martin Bernal published several volumes of a controversial work that argued essentially the same thesis that had been proposed by Uvarov in 1812. Bernal's historical argument stated that the land of Greece had indeed been colonized by the Egyptians and Phoenicians and that the mixing of these peoples with the Pelasgians gave birth to ancient Greek civilization. This late twentieth-century study employed the same terminology of coloniza­tion that Uvarov had used much earlier. In the light of Bernal's his- toriographical argument, his proximity to Uvarov is not that surprising. Until about 1800, European classicists shared the belief in the eastern roots of Greece, asserts Bernal. Then, some scholars realized that this genealogy made Greeks the descendants of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, i.e. the Africans and the Semites. Because of the growing racism of the pan-European intellectual elite, a new era started that Bernal described as the rise of India and the fall of Egypt. Denying the idea of the black and Semitic Athena, historians and linguists invented the Indo-Europeans.

Bernal attributed this early nineteenth-century revisionism to Gottingen's circle of the anti-Semitic Semitologist Johann David Michaelis, who proposed the colonization of the sugar islands in the Caribbean by the deported European Jews (Hess 2000). While Michaelis's student and Uvarov's teacher, Schlozer, was the first to describe the Semitic language family, Uvarov's one-time assistant, Klaproth, was instrumental in the construction of the Indo-German language family (Benes 2004). Schlegel and the Parisian orientalists soon took up the fateful contrast between the Semites and Aryans. Connected to all of them but unable or uneager to choose between their positions, Uvarov synthesized them in his book on the mysteries of Eleusis. Supplementing the idea of the Semitic colonization of Greece, Uvarov identified some inscriptions that were connected with the mysterious Eleusis as sacral Sanskrit words, such as the famous Om. One illustration in the book, which was created by Uvarov's friend Aleksei Olenin, then Russia's Secretary of State, showed the Greek goddess, Ceres/Demeter sitting on a pedestal that featured the images of Indian and Egyptian gods and holding a parchment bearing mystical words in Greek. It was a wonderfully inclusive image; as a historian, Uvarov was more tolerant than he was as a bureaucrat. He chose the epigraph to this book from Virgil (Eclog. III): "Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites" - "Tis not for us to end such great disputes."

Origin is Destiny

Figure 5: Demeter-Ceres, a Greek-Roman Goddess, sits on a stone which exhibits on one side the Indian gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, and, on the other, the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The inscriptions say "Demeter" and "Homer."

Source: From Sergei Uvarov's Essay on Eleusinian Mysteries (Uvaro 1817); drawing by Aleksei Olenin

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Being a colony means having a sovereign abroad. But both Russia and ancient Greece were different; at different stages of their history they were both colonized and colonizing. The potential of this system of similarities and differences was realized while Uvarov combined his duties as Minister of the Enlightenment and President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Working in Uvarov's spirit of enlight­ened, even utilitarian, monarchism, the writer Nikolai Karamzin supported the Hobbesian idea that the unruly Slavs created an auto­cratic regime to tame themselves. Internal conflicts and long-term misery revealed for the Slavs "the danger and the harm of the ruleof the people"; as a result, they acquired a "unanimous belief in the value of Autocracy." But taking the next step, Karamzin contrasted the origins of Russia with other processes of state-building: "Everywhere else Autocracy was introduced by the sword of the strong or the cunning of the ambitious. . . . In Russia, Autocracy was founded with the general consensus of the citizenry: this is what our Chronicle says" (1989: 1/93). In Western Europe, the Normans occupied France or England, but in the east, the Normans were invited to Slavic lands. Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of the Moscow Imperial University whose father was a serf, developed this contrast just a bit further. For him, the story of Rurik amounted to the "provi­dential and fateful text," a parable that resolves "the mystery of Russian history" (Pogodin 1859: 2; Maiorova 2010):

The history of any state is nothing but the development of its founda­tional event. . . . The beginning of the state is the most important part of . . . its history and it defines its fate for ever and ever. It is in the beginning that we need to find the difference of Russian history from any other, Western and Eastern histories. (Pogodin 1846: 2)

Origin and History are clearly different and the former overdeter- mines the latter.[4] For Pogodin, the invitation to Rurik, "to come and rule over us," was not a one-time event, as the Chronicles described it, but an ever-continuing romance. "In the West, everything started with the occupation; with us, everything originates from the free call, the undisputed takeover, and the loving deal." This is why the Russian sovereign has always been "a peaceful guest, a desired protector," while in the west the sovereign has been "a hated invader, an arch­enemy" (Pogodin 1859: 187, 218). The Origin found its place as the eternal center of the Empire.

Adjusting Rurik's story and creating a theory of Origin, Pogodin centralized his own domain, Russian history, around the concept of colonization by consent. His idea of the "loving deal" responded to the colonial doctrine of his boss Uvarov. In 1818, when Pogodin was a student, Uvarov formulated the idea that remained central for his Enlightenment and orientalist initiatives:

Hegemony cannot be established or kept only by the sword. . . . Conquest with no respect for humanity, without the new and better laws, without correcting the condition of the defeated, is a futile and bloody dream. Gaining victories by the enlightenment, taming minds by the humble spirit of religion, by the spread of arts and sciences, by education and the prosperity of the defeated - this is the only method of conquest that could be stabilized for eternity. (Maiofis 2008: 281)

If this project did not sound realistic, Rurik's example could make it digestible. After all the blood spilled in their internal and external endeavors, the statesmen of the post-Napoleonic Restoration wished to reign over the hearts and minds of their subjects. Increasingly conservative, Uvarov coined the triple slogan of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality," which the Romanovs preached and practiced until 1917 (Riasanovsky 1959; Zorin 1997). But Uvarov was also attentive toward religious minorities, such as the Jews, expressing his hope early in 1836 for "the moral and intellectual rapprochement of the Jews and Christian society" (Stanislawski 1983: 68). Sergei Soloviev, who became a professor of history under Uvarov, quipped that his boss worshiped Orthodoxy though he did not believe in Christ, preached Autocracy though he was a "liberal," and called for Nationality though he had read "not a single Russian book" (Soloviev 1983: 268). The latter was definitely an exaggeration.

Under Uvarov, Russian historians became increasingly profes­sional. They felt an obligation to write and teach Russian history in a worldly, comparative context that displaced bizarre and unique events, such as the story of Rurik, to the margins of scholarship. This perspective did not prevent their histories from evolving into imperial narratives of the steady, irresistible growth of Russian power. But first, they had to deal with Rurik, who opened their courses. The founding father of modern Russian history, Sergei Soloviev, closed the circle by connecting Rurik with Peter the Great and situating Rurik's arrival at the site of St. Petersburg: "The location of the great waterway that connects Europe and Asia determined the foundation of St. Petersburg: here in the ninth century the first half of Russian history started, here in the eighteenth century its second half began" (1988: 1/60). But his great student, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, retold the story of the Varangians with noticeable irritation:

What is this but not a stereotypical formula of the law-abiding power that rises out of a contract, a theory very old, but always re-emerg­ing . . . ? The tale of the Call to the Princes, as it is told in the Primary

Chronicle, is not a popular legend. It is a schematic parable of the origins of the state, which is adjusted to the comprehension level of schoolchildren. (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/144)

With the irony that he sometimes smuggled into his writings, Kliuchevsky attributed the contract theory of political power to the Orthodox monks of the twelfth century. He knew that this was an anachronistic hypothesis. Was it Nestor who adjusted his stories for the schoolchildren? The famous historian questioned this part of the Primary Chronicle, but confined his doubts to the notes (Kliuchevsky 1983: 113; Kireeva 1996: 424). Indeed, the idea that the story of the Varangians appeared in the Primary Chronicle in the milieu of Tatishchev and under the influence of Pufendorf and Hobbes would have made perfect historical sense. However, several versions of the Chronicle had recorded this story much earlier. A symbol of larger historiographical and ideological problems, Rurik embodies the con­troversies of autonomy, freedom, and modernity that re-emerge with every new turn of Russian and global history. Tired of chasing Rurik in the archive and unable to erase him, Russian historians ventured a set of creative concepts, the epistemological Rurikides, which devel­oped their own reproductive energy.

To Colonize Oneself

The Romantic and then the Soviet poets sang of the warmth and beauty of the Russian land. But historians of Russia expressed deep insecurity about the Russian environment, both natural and social. Russian nature was not the mother for Russians, but the stepmother, said Sergei Soloviev (1988: 7/8-9). During the crisis of the seven­teenth century, Muscovites felt alien in their own state, "as if they were accidental and temporary dwellers in someone else's house," wrote Vasilii Kliuchevsky (1956: 3/52). Surprisingly, this historian also applied the same oxymoronic trope, homesickness at home, to a man of the eighteenth century, Peter I: he was "a guest in his own home" (1956: 4/31). Strikingly, the same author also applied the same trope to a typical early-nineteenth-century noble who, "strolling with Voltaire's book somewhere in his own village," felt himself "an alien among his own kind" (1956: 5/183). In his wonderful essay on Pushkin's Onegin, Kliuchevsky applied the same characteristic to its fictional character: "[Onegin] was foreign to the society in which he moved" (1990: 9/87). An important trope of the High Imperial Period, this persistent image was sometimes based on historical evi­dence and sometimes not; what is clear is that the historians preferred to see their favorite protagonists in this light.

"Why did God make me a stranger and an outcast in mine own house?" wrote the renowned African American intellectual, W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 (Washington et al. 1965: 214). Postcolonial theorists have also speculated about this experience of being "strangers to ourselves" (Kristeva 1991). "The 'unhomely' is a paradigmatic colo­nial and postcolonial condition," states Bhabha (1994: 13). In the nineteenth century, the pioneers of Russian historiography found their own formulas for the same intuition.

Soloviev and the Frontier

Having visited Russia in 1843, August von Haxthausen wrote that this country was involved not in a colonial expansion but, rather, in an "internal colonization," which was "the most important subject of the whole internal politics and economy of this Empire" (1856: 2/76). Unlike the other Russian discoveries of this Prussian official, this one failed to attract public attention. However, mid-nineteenth- century agricultural experts eagerly used the concept of colonization (kolonizatsiia) when they discussed and regulated migrations of Russian peasants to the peripheral regions of the Empire, mainly to southern Russia, Siberia and, later, Central Asia. One of many such debates took place in 1861 at the Russian Geographical Society. The journalist Nikolai Leskov, who managed some of these internal reset­tlements (see Chapter 11), responded to the speech of the geographer Mikhail Veniukov, who had traversed Asia and a little later presided over the agricultural reform in eastern Poland. Leskov stated that, in practice, many organized migrations were directed toward "the central areas of our Empire" rather than its distant possessions, and this was a major difference between Russian and British modes of colonization (Leskov 1988: 60).

The mid- and late nineteenth century was the moment of imperial expansion on a large scale (Arendt 1970). Taking its part in the con­quest of America, the Great Game in Asia, and even the scramble for Africa, the Russian Empire was no less concerned about its vast hin­terland. Having appropriated imperialist language, it needed to adjust the overseas concept of colonization to its terrestrial, provincial realms. The Moscow historian, Sergei Soloviev, made the conceptual breakthrough. Drawing his academic genealogy directly from Schlozer, he was engaged in a fierce polemics with Khomiakov and his Slavophile followers, whom he deemed "an anti-historical school" (see Chapter 1). He appropriated Khomiakov's critical notion of Russia as a colony, but gave it an interpretation that was deeper both historically and logically. Applying the discourse of colonization to pre-Petrine Russia, Soloviev rejected the very difference between the colonizers and the colonized: "Russia was a vast, virgin country, which was waiting to be populated, waiting for its history to begin: therefore ancient Russian history is the history of a country that colo­nizes itself" (1988: 2/631).

Soloviev formulated this astonishing dictum in his survey of Russia's ancient history. If there is no point in differentiating between the subject and the object of Russia's colonization, then let us avoid doing so. Soloviev gave a dynamic depiction of the concerns of a self-colonized country:

To populate as soon as possible, to call people from everywhere to come to empty places, to tempt them with various benefits; to leave a place for newer, better lands, for the most profitable conditions, for an edge that is quiet and peaceful; on the other hand, to cling to the people, to bring them back, to force others not to accept them - these are the important concerns of a country that colonizes itself. (1988: 2/631)

For a colonial mind, there is no greater distance in the world than that between the metropolitan land and its colony. How can a country colonize itself? Soloviev knew the problem and emphasized it:

This country [Russia] was not a colony that was separated from the metropolitan land by oceans: the heart of the state's life was situated in this very country. . . . While the needs and functions of the state were increasing, the country did not lose her self-colonizing character. (1988: 2/631)

In Russian, the reflexive form that Soloviev used, "to colonize itself," is as unusual as it is in English. In the original even more than in the translation, this formula sounds dynamic, even forceful, and para­doxical. But Soloviev and his disciples were consistent in the use of this verbal form. Going into detail in his multiple volumes, Soloviev explained that the direction of Russia's self-colonization was coher­ent, from the south-west to the north-east, from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Dnieper. Going north, the ancient Russian tribes went to Novgorod and to the coast of the White Sea. Going east, they colonized the upper Volga and the neighborhood of Moscow. There they established the Russian state, but the direction of colonization remained the same, to the east and all the way to Siberia. Importantly, Soloviev did not apply the idea of "Russia colo­nizing itself" to the history that he perceived as modern. In his later volumes that described the "new" Russian history as opposed to the "ancient," he did not use the term "colonization."

In a pioneering essay, Mark Bassin (1993) compared Soloviev's idea of Russia's "colonization of itself" with Frederick J. Turner's concept of the American "frontier." There are many resemblances and differ­ences between these two concepts, both of them crucial to the histo­ries of Russia and America. Like the American frontier, the external line of Russia's colonization was uncertain, diffuse, and constantly moving. As in America, this line was centrally important for the development of Russian imperial culture. Persecuted religious minori­ties were equally important in the American and Russian frontiers (Turner 1920; Etkind 1998; Breyfogle 2005). However, there are also significant differences between Turner's and Soloviev's concepts.

Turner explored the modern developments on the frontier, while Soloviev restricted his use of the concept of Russia's self-colonization to its "ancient," i.e. early medieval, history. This difference is not as serious as it sounds because there is nothing in the concept of colo­nization that prevents using it for the modern Russian period; indeed, as we will see shortly, Kliuchevsky made this move, but Soloviev did not. While Turner focused on the characteristic culture of the western frontier and explored the mechanisms of its impact on the eastern states, Soloviev did not produce a comparable portrait of the external line of colonization. However, historians have produced remarkable studies of various parts of the Russian frontier.[5] The pioneers of the frontline - the hunter, the trader, and the sectarian - were similar, but the second and third lines of colonization were vastly different. In America, as Turner saw it, lands behind the frontier were cultivated in a regular "four-stages order" by ranchers, farmers, and industrial­ists. The frontier was pushing the cultivated space to the west. In Russia throughout centuries, the movement of the colonization line to the east left huge lands behind it as virginal as they had been. Later, these empty spaces had to be colonized again, and then again. America's frontier and Russia's colonization had different topologies, the former relatively continuous, the latter leaving in its wake holes, pockets, and folds.

Mapping these internal lands was tough; exploring the peoples who populated them was no easier (Widdis 2004; Tolz 2005). Although in various segments of the immense frontline of Russia's external colonization, "middle grounds" were created that hybridized the colonized and the colonizers, these synthetic cultures were local, variegated, and dispersed over huge stretches of time and space. It is all but impossible to describe them all in one ethno-sociological por­trait, as Turner did in his work on the American frontier. Developing centrifugally, these local formations were crucial to the economic development of Russian centers, from Novgorod to Moscow to St.

Petersburg. With gunpowder, alcohol, and germs on their side, the Russians exterminated, absorbed, or displaced many of their neigh­bors. But these processes took centuries. Multiple waves of adven­ture, violence, labor, and breeding rolled between Russia's centers and the moving frontline of colonization. Culturally thin, Russia's frontier was geographically broad. However much it changed with time, it always covered huge areas of space. Within these areas, there was no regular transition from hunting to herding or from planting to indus­trial development. Sometimes trapping remained the only profitable business for centuries; huge cities were sometimes built on land that had never been ploughed. Even Russian capitals were established on territories that were foreign to their founders. Indeed, the lands of Novgorod and Kiev were as foreign to the Varangians who ruled there as the land of St. Petersburg was for the Muscovites. From the borders to the capitals, the space of internal colonization extended throughout Russia.

Shchapov and Zoological Economy

A significant influence on the further development of the self- colonization idea was the historian Afanasii Shchapov, who wrote most of his works not when he was a university professor, but when he was either a state official or a political exile. He was the first who actually thought of Russian colonization not as a vigorous adventure but as a bloody, genuinely political process. It had its victims as well as victors, and the task of a historian was to see both. Teaching history at Kazan Imperial University in the late 1850s, Shchapov sorted out an ecclesiastical archive of the Solovetsky monastery in the far north, which was evacuated to land-locked Kazan as Russia was preparing for the Crimean War (the monastery, thousands of miles from the Crimea, was nonetheless bombed by the British navy in 1854). It was in this remote archive that the leading historian of the next generation, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, wrote his first monograph about "the monastery colonization" of northern Russia; his first criti­cal review was also on Shchapov, of whom he had a "very high opinion" (Nechkina 1974: 434). But by then Shchapov was no longer in Kazan. In 1861, he was accused of fomenting unrest, was arrested, brought to Petersburg, pardoned by the Tsar, and, in a sensational move, was appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Later, exiled to his native Siberia, he still published his revisionist articles in the mainstream Russian journals.

Agreeing with Soloviev that the history of Russia was the history of colonization, Shchapov described the process as a "millennium of colonization and cultivation of woods and swamps, the fight with Finnish, Mongol, and Turkish tribes" (1906: 2/182). An ethnic Creole - son of a Russian deacon and a Siberian Buriat - Shchapov empha­sized racial mixing more than any other Russian historian. He was also the true pioneer of ecological history. Two methods of coloniza­tion were primary: "fur colonization," with hunters harvesting and depleting the habitats of fur animals and moving further and further across Siberia all the way to Alaska; and "fishing colonization," which supplied Russian centers with fresh- or salt-water fish and caviar. In this attempt at ecological history, Shchapov made an impor­tant step forward from Soloviev.

From Rurik the Varangian to Ivan the Terrible, Russia's wealth was measured in fur. Coining the concept of "zoological economy," Shchapov understood fur as the clue to Russia's colonization (1906: 2/280-93, 309-37). Beaver led the Russians to the place where they founded Novgorod; grey squirrel secured them the wealth of Moscow; sable led them to the place that became mapped as Siberia; sea otter brought them to Alaska and California. Throughout the Middle Ages and what elsewhere was known as the Renaissance, man-made migra­tions of small, wild, furry animals defined the expansion of Russia. Winter roads, trade stations, and militarized storehouses for fur spanned across Eurasia, playing roles that were not dissimilar from the Great Silk Route in medieval Asia. Ecologically, colonization also meant deforestation. "Agricultural colonization" followed "fur colo­nization" and gradually replaced it. It was not a sword but an axe that moved Russia's colonization, said Shchapov, with the plough following the axe. But the bow and the trap preceded them all. For Shchapov, colonization was an easy and positive concept, which he used on almost every page of his wordy and warm writings. It meant the multi-edged process of exploring, populating, cultivating, and depleting new lands. Russia's colonization had to be understood as parallel histories of peoples moved, animals exterminated, and plants cultivated. It was an unprecedented vision, multidimensional, envi­ronmental, and human.

Kliuchevsky and Modernity

Decades later, Kliuchevsky repeated the motto of his teacher, Soloviev, and revised it in one significant respect, which I attribute to the influ­ence of Shchapov: "The history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself. . . . [T]his centuries-long movement has contin­ued until the current moment" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/31). If for Soloviev, Russia's self-colonization started in ancient times and stopped in the Middle Ages, Kliuchevsky extended this concept well into the modern age. When he revised his work in 1907, he added a long passage about the early twentieth-century state-sponsored migra­tions to Siberia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Coast, in which he saw the newest manifestations of the "centuries-long movement of Russia's colonization." It was the only significant change that Kliuchevsky made in his multi-volume Course of Russian History for its new edition. Covering Russia's long history from ancient to modern times, he wished to apply the concept of colonization to his era as well.

Talking about the ancient Russians, Soloviev gave a description of the Russian national character that was widely quoted:

Because of [the Russians'] high mobility, their shapelessness, their habit of leaving after the first difficulty, they developed a semi-settledness, a lack of commitment to a place, a weakened moral focus, and lack of calculation; Russians developed the habit of looking for easy work, of living in limbo, from one day to another. (Soloviev 1988: 2/631; see also Bassin 1993: 500; Sunderland 2004: 171)

Kliuchevsky argued that this set of characteristics was a consequence of self-colonization. He generalized that this "particular relation of the people to the country," the relation of colonization, "worked in Russia over centuries and is working now." In this, Kliuchevsky saw "the main condition" that defined the development of "changing forms of community" in Russian history. Repeating and varying Soloviev's formula, that Russia is "a country that colonizes itself," Kliuchevsky wished to emphasize and extend this process even more than his teacher. Thus, this most influential of Russian historians stated that "the colonization of the country is the single most impor­tant fact of Russia's history" and that, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, the standard periods of Russian history are nothing more than "the major moments of colonization" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/31-2).

Self-applicable judgments have an unusual logic. If X does Y to Z, as in the statement "Britain colonizes India," that implies that X and Z were there before Y occurred. But this straightforward logic wouldn't work for the colonization of Russia because, according to Soloviev and Kliuchevsky, Russia has constituted itself through the process of colonization. There was no X that preceded Y and no Z that was different from X. It all has evolved together. Therefore, in "Russia colonizes itself," X does Y to X. As Kliuchevsky said, the area of colonization expanded along with the territory of the state. Since the colonized areas did not retain their special status but were absorbed by the Russian state, there is no reason to distinguish between Russia's colonies and its metropolitan center. With the ter­ritorial growth of the state, Russia colonized the newly appropriated territories, but it also (though probably in different forms) colonized itself at its imperial core, which has recurrently undergone this process of colonization.

"The history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself." There is an awkward repetition in this formula but there is also a feeling that it could not be worded differently. Structurally, the formula combined the most trivial, even banal repetition in the first half and the paradoxical, deconstructive second half. By saying, "The history of Russia is the history of a country," Soloviev and Kliuchevsky alerted the reader to the fact that, this time, they were talking about Russia as the country and not as the people, the state, or the empire. In Russian, as in English, "country" stands somewhere between the geographical "land" and the political "nation," which is exactly what is needed. They could not say what they wanted to say without this rhetorical repetition, because an alternative formula such as "The history of Russia consisted of self-colonization" would assume that Russia existed before this self-colonization, while the very idea was to describe the process in which Russia was created by a process that it also performed. Polished by so many hands, the formula could not be rendered in any other way. This is why it was repeated.

Self-Colonization School

Kliuchevsky's followers distinguished between various modes of Russia's colonization, such as "free colonization" that was led by private men, mostly runaway serfs and deserted soldiers or Cossacks; "military colonization," which happened as a result of regular cam­paigns; and "monastery colonization," which was centered around major Orthodox sanctuaries that owned thousands of serfs, carried trade, and built outposts. For them, the trails of Russia's eastward colonization were blazed by fur hunters, beatified by monks, fortified by soldiers, and cultivated by settlers. Their purpose was a systematic, balanced overview of these events that would show the civilizing mission of Russia in the vast, wild expanse of Eurasia. Loyal to the cause of Russian nationalism, Kliuchevsky's school tended to ignore the huge amounts of violence that these colonizing activities entailed. Although it was violence that made necessary all the fences, walls, and towers of the outposts, monasteries, and towns that these histo­rians described in detail, sensitivity to this violence and compassion for its victims came mainly with the next generation of historians, who would experience the Russian revolution, take part in it, and often find themselves either under arrest or in emigration.

A student of Kliuchevsky's, Pavel Miliukov, elaborated on this colonization theme with a new emphasis. As a young professor, Miliukov was dismissed from Moscow University for political activ­ism, was imprisoned, released, and mixed history with politics for decades. In his multi-volume course of Russian history, he realized better than his predecessors how much violence the process of colo­nization required, and mapped large ethnicities who were either absorbed or exterminated by Russians on their path of colonization. In a special article of the Russian Encyclopedia, Miliukov wrote, "Russia's colonization by the Russian people has continued through­out the whole duration of Russian history and has constituted one of its most characteristic features" (1895: 740).

In the early 1930s, Matvei Liubavsky, a prominent disciple of Kliuchevsky who served as the Rector of Moscow Imperial University until 1917, presented a systematic exploration of the favorite idea of his teacher. Liubavsky (1996) repeated that "Russian history is the history of a country that colonized ceaselessly": instead of the reflec­tive mode that was used by his predecessors, he used a simpler con­struction - "colonized ceaselessly" rather than "colonized itself." This shift is subtle but significant. It matched a further statement by Liubavsky, that he wrote his treatise as an exploration of "the pre­dominantly external colonization that created the territory of the Russian state." Bringing his long narrative to the late nineteenth century, Liubavsky included a chapter on the colonization of the Baltic lands, which embraces the area of St. Petersburg. Ironically, his book about external colonization ended with a chapter on the colo­nization of the territory of the imperial capital. But he did write his history of Russia as a history of external colonization - how Russia colonized the others rather than colonized itself - and his awareness of this fact shows that he understood better than his predecessors the political meaning of the concept. His book remained unpublished because he wrote it after he was arrested, interrogated, and exiled to Bashkiria, one of those colonized regions about which he wrote.

In the late imperial period, Russian historiography was dominated by the self-colonization school. From history textbooks, its ideas found their way into encyclopedias. Russian historians wrote detailed accounts of Russia's takeover of the Crimea, Finland, Ukraine, Poland, and other lands. However, they did not describe these areas as Russian colonies. (In this respect, a remarkable exception among Russian authors was Nikolai Iadrintsev, whose book Siberia as a Colony (2003; first published in 1882), was a great example of an anti-imperial history.) Instead of talking about the Russian Empire colonizing the Caucasus or Poland, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky argued that "Russia colonized itself." However, they held a critical stance toward the peculiar character of this particular empire. "As the ter­ritory of the Russian state was expanding and the external power of the people growing, the internal freedom of the people was decreas­ing," wrote Kliuchevsky (1956: 3/8). He used the concept of self- colonization as a shortcut for this "inverse proportion" between the imperial space and internal freedom, a usage that modern philoso­phers such as Habermas would probably approve. Kliuchevsky's disciples, who saw the worldwide processes of decolonization, repro­duced his definition with minor variations. By merging subject and object, this formula provided them with an inverted, maybe even perverted, language that they reserved for talking about Russia and did not use when talking about other parts of the world (Etkind 2002).

The discourse of self-colonization was a specific, though long-term and surprisingly robust, moment in Russian historiography. Living in the age of colonial empires and working for a country that competed with these empires, leading Russian historians found the language of colonization appropriate and necessary for their work. However, they transformed the western idea of colonization in quite a radical way. First, in Russia, the process of colonization was construed as self- referential and internal, rather than as object-directed and external. Second, in Russia, we often find approval of the processes of coloni­zation, which is different from the British and French historiographi- cal traditions and from the strongly ideological, postcolonial approach to colonization. Whereas twentieth-century historians generally denounced imperialism, their nineteenth-century predecessors did not always use "colonial" words in a critical way. Even Shchapov, a pariah and exile, admired the heroism of those who accomplished the colonization of a large country. The most critical among histori­ans of Russian self-colonization, Miliukov, became a hawkish politi­cian as Minister of Foreign Affairs. His objective in World War I was to take Constantinople for Russia.

Soviet historians largely abandoned the discourse of self-coloniza­tion: it did not fit the class approach and the idea of the socialist commonwealth. In late nineteenth-century Russia, colonization was still perceived as progress; in the Soviet Union, it was reactionary and Russia's history was supposed to have little to do with it. A student of Kliuchevsky, who became his Soviet biographer, counted the concept of Russia's colonization among his weaker ideas (Nechkina 1974: 427). However, the colonization paradigm continued in the work of a largely forgotten group of political geographers, led by Veniamin Semenov-Tian-Shansky (1915; Polian 2001). For a while, the Soviet activities in the Arctic continued under the name of colo­nization, which engaged some historians of the Kliuchevsky school (Ocherki 1922; Holquist 2010a). Ironically, the colonial terminology vanished from official discourse in the early 1930s, when the Soviet government implemented the most massive and brutal methods of colonization, by the forced labor of the gulag prisoners.

To conclude, the historians of the self-colonization school were not anti-imperialist thinkers; they were not particularly critical toward Russian imperial appropriations. Their historiographical tradition was secular, liberal, and nationalist. Like some Russian rulers before them, these historians were engaged in "cross-imperial knowledge acquisition" (Stoler 2009: 39), which connected the Russian Empire to other empires of the world via relations of selective and sometimes reciprocal mimesis. The notebooks of the all-time leader of this tradi­tion, Kliuchevsky, surprise the reader with the political despair that is hidden in his famous course of lectures: "In the Europe of kings, Russia was a decisive force; in the Europe of nations, Russia is but a thick log that is caught in an eddy" (2001: 406). Three generations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian historians, whose teachings and textbooks constitute the core of Russian historiogra­phy, disagreed about many features of the Russian past but there was one formula that they kept repeating one after the other: "Russia colonized itself."

Barrels of Fur

Historians write from the past to the present, but think from the present to the past. Twenty-first-century Russia's successes and prob­lems are plentiful; along with some others, I believe that the depen­dency on oil and gas exports is an important source of many of them (see, e.g., Ross 2001; Friedman 2006; Goldman 2008). But I intend to show that a resource dependency far predates post-Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union.

Protego Ergo Obligo

Suppose that some valuable resource, say a rare metal, is available at a single spot on earth. The labor theory of value does not work there; the price of the metal is not dependent upon the labor that is needed for mining this metal. Since the whole population depends on the redistribution of income that comes from a single spot, this state has no reason to develop the governance mechanisms that enable fair taxation, competition, and rule of law. The security costs are serious because the state that owns this spot would likely have many enemies. The transportation costs are also substantial, because this spot is likely to be far from the traditional centers of population, which developed according to an entirely different logic. Growth in the resource-bound state requires relatively little labor or knowledge. Instead, it develops a security apparatus that protects the source of wealth and its transportation routes, and a bureaucracy that redis­tributes the wealth and demands respect.

Political philosophers have always known that those who provide security tend to grasp property. "The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state," wrote Carl Schmitt (1976, 56; see also Bates 2001). In our hypothetical case it means that the group that trades the resource is the same group that protects the state. Besides the classical monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, as it was defined by Max Weber, such a state develops a monopoly over the legitimate trade of its resource: a double monopoly that could be best compared to a Mobius strip, with one side managing the resource, and another side managing security, and both sides smoothly merging with each other (Etkind 2009).

Let us also imagine that the state controls a territory that is larger than the spot with the valuable resource, and there are many people living everywhere in the land. This situation creates a rigid, caste-like structure. Two classes of citizens emerge: the small elite of producers who extract, protect, and trade the resource, and others whose exis­tence depends on the redistribution of the rent that this trade pro­vides. The state is fully dependent on the trading group; moreover, these indispensable people are the state. But this state does not neces­sarily ignore the people; it provides them with security and other goods, indeed all that can be done after the state satisfies its own needs. Human capital does not determine the wealth of this nation. On the contrary, the resource-bound state provides charity to the people.

In a neighboring land, which I call labor-bound, the work of citi­zens creates the wealth of a nation. There is no other source of wealth there than the competitive work of its citizens. Value is created by labor; this old axiom still works in this economy. The state taxes this labor and has no other income. The health and education of the citi­zens are not only in their best interest but also in the interests of the state, because the better they work, the more taxes they pay. But then, these happy citizens find out that the growth of their economy depends on a resource they do not have. As they buy more and more of this resource, its price grows, production diminishes with deple­tion, and labor becomes relatively cheaper than the resource. From now on, both trading states become resource-bound. Nothing on earth could change this common dependency unless the labor-bound society focuses a part of its creative labor on substituting the deficient resource with something that it has in abundance.

This process has not occurred with oil, but many centuries ago it did happen with another valuable resource.

A Divine Marvel

In a lively tale dated 1096, the Primary Chronicle describes the first resource curse in Russian history:

We have encountered a divine marvel. . . . There are mountains, which slope down to the arm of the sea, and their height reaches to the heavens. . . . Within these mountains are heard great cries and the sound of voices and [some people] are struggling to cut their way out of this mountain. . . . Their language is unintelligible. They point at iron objects and make gestures as if to ask for them. If given a knife or an axe, they supply furs in return. (Laurentian Text 1953: 184)

These people, the Iugra, were unclean, continues the Chronicle, and with God's help Alexander the Great locked them inside this moun­tain in the northern Urals. They will be released when the world comes to its end; until then, they will be trading fur for iron. They are imagined as a trading machine, speechless and subhuman. They do not speak because their trade does not require language. Nothing but fur justifies the humans from Novgorod to be there, among the Iugra.

Apart from the reference to Alexander, the tale is not far from the truth. In their quest for fur, the Russians colonized a huge, exotic, and inhospitable space, called "the land of darkness" with early Arabic travelers (Slezkine 1994; Martin 2004). Combining barter with coercion, the Russians locked the peoples of the Arctic north into a trading system that led to the extermination of animals and humans. The people of Novgorod thought that these operations would continue until the end of the world as they knew it; indeed, their termination would signal the end of Novgorod. It was a straight­forward case of colonization that was recognized as such by major historians, Russian and western alike. Continued by the Muscovite state, which expanded the fur trade much further to the east, this colonization led to a huge accumulation of wealth and a proportional desolation of the natives, both processes being of outstanding scale in colonial history.

The Russians arrived in small numbers and did not hunt the animals. They needed locals to do the highly skilled jobs of hunting animals and dressing furs. The natives had the skills but were not much interested in fur, which they used mainly for their own warmth. Only force or commerce could turn these fishermen or reindeer herders into full-time hunters. The state established the fur trade in several steps. First, the military teams confiscated the furs that were already stored there. Second, the invaders imposed a tribute that obliged each native man to deliver a certain number of pelts annually. Third, the servitors established customs in towns and on the roads that collected the tithe in fur, usually a tenth of every transaction. Corruption was high and uncontrollable; bribes and other illegal fees ate up a big part of the state income (Bushkovitch 1980: 117). Novgorod and, later, Moscow had to send more servitors to these vast lands, though the number of Russian men was never high. The tale of the divine marvel was prophetic: the native tribes were locked into the fur trade. As long as they provided fur, it was in the interest of the servitors to maintain their conditions rather than to christen and educate them. If baptized into the Orthodox church, natives would stop paying the tribute in fur and start paying tax in rubles. This was undesirable; later, even Christian communities had to pay tribute instead of tax if they were perceived as non-Orthodox (Znamenski 2007). Since in many cases, the partners did not share a language and were scared of one another, they developed a method of "silent trade" that was surprisingly similar to the Iugra trade of 1096:

For many years, [the Chukchi] would have no dealings with [the Russians] except at the end of a spear. They would hang a bundle of furs . . . upon a sharp polished blade of a long Chukchi lance, and if a Russian trader chose to take it off and suspend in its place a fair equiva­lent in the shape of tobacco, well and good, if not, there is no trade. (Kennan 1870: 286)

In Siberia, as well as in North America, the fur business was dif­ferent from most "cross-cultural trades" because it involved a meeting between the organized Europeans and the natives, who had been isolated for centuries. Hunting and trapping was intrinsically violent, did not entail the long-term cycles that were characteristic for agri­culture, and had no need of the participation of women (Curtin 1984: 219). Trade was also violent; even when the Russians used barter, it was barely distinguishable from robbery. They exchanged furs for iron and other products of their superior civilization, such as alcohol, tobacco, beads, knives, and, later, traps and rifles. The Soviet scholars politely called this method "the non-equivalent exchange" that was characteristic for the "initial accumulation of the capital."

In their quest for fur, Russian traders explored the vast lands that stretch far to the north and east from the metropolitan centers, Novgorod and Moscow, all the way to the White Sea, across the Ural Mountains, and into Siberia. Firearms were the key to this success, even though they often worked merely as fireworks. But violence was not easy to convert into power. Technical terms that were foreign to both sides, usually of Arabic or Turkish origin, were meant to mask the rude force. Concepts and practices traveled across the land, from the Caucasus to Alaska. Yasak referred to the special regime of taxa­tion, a tribute in fur. Judging by later evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, another typical method of extracting fur from the natives was kidnapping, which was known as "taking amanats." Capturing the native women and children and holding them in captivity, Russians demonstrated them to their men in exchange for furs. If the children survived to maturity, these amanats would speak Russian; baptized, they could marry Russians and con­tribute to the creolization of the locals (Liapunova 1987: 59). In 1788, the Russians held as many as 500 children of the Aleuts as amanats. Russian emperors, including the enlightened Catherine the Great, authorized this method for "taming the natives" in official documents (Slezkine 1994). First recorded in the late sixteenth century in the southern steppes, "taking amanats" was practiced by all sides during the long Caucasian wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Khodarkovsky 2002: 57). Broadly used as a method of Russian colonization of Siberia and Alaska, this institutionalized kidnapping was practically unknown in the British, French, or Spanish colonization of the Americas (Grinev n/d).

Hunting the hunters, the invaders met with formidable resistance on the part of some tribes such as the Chukchi, the Kamchadals, the Aleuts, or the Koryaks (Slezkine 1994; Iadrintsev 2003; Bockstoce 2009). When challenged, the Russians responded with increasingly violent methods, starting with public flogging and ending with indis­criminate killing. The Orthodox priest Innokentii Veniaminov, bishop of Alaska and later Metropolitan of Moscow, reported that in 1766 Ivan Soloviev with his seamen exterminated about 3,000 Aleuts, more than a half of the rebellious tribe (Veniaminov 1840: 188-90). Hundreds of the survivors were forced to resettle to another archi­pelago to hunt sea otters. Reportedly, natives hated Russians so much that they did not accept their superior tools, such as traps, and con­tinued to hunt with bow and arrow, therefore losing the competition to the incomers (Pavlov 1972). Like almost all ventures of the Russian state, the fur trade was multinational. Along with the ethnic Russians, the newcomers included their allies, such as the Cossacks; their exiles, such as the Swedes and the Poles; and their merchants such as the Tartars and the Jews (Glebov 2009).

Gradually, Russian servitors learned to bring the natives "under the exalted hand of the great sovereign" by demonstrating force rather than applying it. In a ceremonial way, cannons and muskets were discharged while the native chiefs took an oath to the sovereign and the tribesmen were lined up as if they were an imperial guard (Lantzeff 1972: 93). While the sovereign understood the fur business as a kind of taxation and the natives understood it as a kind of slavery, the local servitors had to improvise a middle ground on which they could establish a relatively peaceful and profitable trade. Giving "gifts" to the chiefs of the tribes, befriending the shamans, raising or even adopting the "amanats," and arming one tribe against another were ordinary methods of bringing people to tribute. In many respects, the system of Russia's rule in northern Eurasia was comparable with the later British system in India. The rule was indirect, many tribes preserved their autonomy, and the number of colonizers in relation to the colonized territory was miniscule. However, there were many differences. Because of fur, Russian colonization was a very lucrative enterprise. Local tribes in Siberia were exterminated to an extent that would have been unthinkable in India; actually, the population losses were close to North American levels (Curtin 1984: 208). Finally, even with the depletion of the key resource, fur, the Russian Empire kept its hold in Siberia, while the Brits preferred to quit when they found maintaining the colony to be untenable.

In their sub-Arctic colony, the Russians created a four-layer politi­cal pyramid that consisted of the distant sovereign, his Russian servi­tors, the native hunters, and fur animals. Violence spread down from the top to the bottom and profit grew from the bottom to the top. Formulating an entirely different experience, the philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida wrote about proximity between the sovereign and the beast, both of whom are exempt from the law. In this they are like the criminals, who populated Siberia along with animals. "Beast, criminal, and sovereign have a troubling resem­blance: they call on each other and recall each other . . . outside the law" (Derrida 2009: 38). This resemblance of beasts and sovereigns created a thick layer of political mythology, with Behemoths and Leviathans, the wolves of Rome and lions of Venice, and Russian sables and bears. Novgorod and Moscow based their political economy on the direct connection, economic as well as aesthetic, between the fur-clad tsars and the fur-carrying animals, with little or, ideally, no participation from those who were irrelevant to this connection.

The resource-bound economy makes the population largely super­fluous. An essential part of this system is land. In its enormous northern and eastern stretches, the geographical space of Russia was largely shaped by the fur trade.

Boom and Depletion

The fur pyramid was fragile. The closer we are to the recorded history, the more we know about the rebellions of the locals, the depletion of the animals, the corruption of the servitors, and the discontent of the sovereign. The fur trade brought many tribes to the edge of extermination; in some cases the population loss went so deep and happened so quickly that it is proper to speak of genocide. In 1882, the Siberian Nikolai Iadrintsev was able to mention about a dozen ethnicities that had been fully exterminated earlier but whose names were still remembered. From the mid-eighteenth to the mid- nineteenth centuries, the Kamchadals lost about 90 percent of its population, the Vogules about 50 percent, etc. (Iadrintsev 2003: 137-9).

Replacing the natives, Russian trappers had better access to markets and courts. With their arrival, fur trade normalized, but it coincided with the depopulation of animals. Only sables provided enough profit to support a Russian trapper; squirrel, otter, and other animals remained the business of the natives. In the early seventeenth century, a good trapper could get as many as 200 sables a year; closer to the end of the century, the numbers were 15-20 sables a year, which made the trade unprofitable (Pavlov 1972: 224). Then, Russian trappers dropped the business, but native hunters stayed in the trade. Objects of desire and vanity, Siberian furs fed conspicuous consumption at the pan-European level for a longer period of time than any other class of colonial goods. Silver from Spanish colonies, spices from Dutch colonies, or tea from British colonies could have generated even more wealth and suffering; but in their symbolic value, furs were difficult to compete with. For just one of Henry IV's outfits, London skinners used 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermine skins, which were extracted from the wild tribes thousands of miles to the east (Veale 1966: 20).

The fur trade became the backbone of the Hanseatic League, which included Novgorod as its eastern member and established a trading colony there. Upon purchase, the Germans bounded the fur into bundles and packed them into barrels. In the spring, the Germans shipped the fur barrels by Russian lakes and rivers to the Neva and the Baltic. In exchange, Russian merchants received weapons, silver, cloth, salt, and sweet wine; beer, herring, and metal products also appeared on the market. The fur trade provided a significant part of hard currency that Russian principalities needed for buying weapons and mercenaries. In the late fourteenth century, about 95 percent of all furs that were imported to London were of Hanseatic origin and most of them came from Novgorod. The numbers were huge. During one year, 1391, London imported 350,960 squirrel skins (Veale 1966: 76). It was the time when the Novgorod teams had already crossed the Urals and collected tribute from the western Siberian tribes of the Khanty, Mansi, and others. It was also the time when the English language made one of its very few appropriations from Russian, the word "sable."

Though Russia was not the only source of furs, this source became increasingly important with the deforestation of Europe. Until the end of the fifteenth century, squirrels were available near Novgorod and beavers were trapped near Moscow (Pavlov 1972: 57, 67). However, London's import of fur started declining in the fifteenth century, which some authors put down to the changing fashions in England; it was also the result of the depletion of the Russian forests. The fall of revenue from the fur trade was a reason for the escalating conflict between Russian centers. The fall of Novgorod in 1478 fol­lowed after the decline of both the export volumes and the prices of grey squirrel in Europe. Instead, Europeans discovered sable. The routes to Siberia, the land of sable, went through oriental Kazan, which was taken by the Muscovite troops in 1522 in what was the turning point of Russia's history of colonization.

The burden of the resource-bound state only increased with these events. In 1557, each male inhabitant of Iugra had to give one sable a year to the sovereign of Moscow; in 1609, he was obliged to pay seven sables (Pavlov 1972: 70). In 1581, 800 men led by Ermak defeated the khan of Siberia. Carrying the Viking-style boats between Siberian rivers and rowing upstream, they reached the tribes that they could fight with. Their firearms gave them the advantage. Historians, poets, and artists have imagined these events by analogy. Let me try to do so too:

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river. . . . We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance. (Conrad 1988: 37)

After two years of fighting, Ermak was killed. Meanwhile, 2,400 sable, 800 black fox, and 2,000 beaver pelts were sent to Moscow

Figure 6: Vasilii Surikov, Ermak's conquest of Siberia, 1895 (in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Note the abundance of firearms on one side and furs on the other side of this battle. Source: Wikimedia Commons

(Fisher 1943: 26). According to an historian of Siberian fur, Oleg Vilkov (1999), more than seven million sables were procured in Siberia in the 70 years between 1621 and 1690. An American histo­rian gives an estimate that is considerably lower.¹ Janet Martin (2004) estimated the average price of sable at the end of the sixteenth century in Moscow to be one ruble per pelt. Using this low estimate, we arrive at a sum of 50,000-100,000 rubles a year - a healthy and long-term revenue that the state was learning to appropriate. While Russian sources estimated the proportion of the fur trade to represent a quarter of the gross income of the Muscovite state, one American historian gives the more believable figure of one-tenth (Fisher 1943: 122) and a Soviet scholar, one-fifth (Pavlov 1972). However, the fur's part in the state treasury was much higher. Another major commodity was salt, but it was traded only on the internal market; the role of grain export was minuscule until late in the eighteenth century. As a matter of comparison, in 2005-10, the share of the oil and gas indus­try in Russia's gross national income was about 25 percent, and represented 60-75 percent of Russian exports. Though it works nicely for the export side of the Russian trade, this comparison does not work for its import side. In its late period, the Soviet Union and, now, post-Soviet Russia have been able to exchange their raw com­modities for a large proportion of their food, clothing, and other vital goods. This feat was unimaginable in Muscovite Russia. Fur was traded for luxury goods and military equipment, both of which fueled the growing structures of the state and remained unavailable to the general population.

The centuries-long income from the fur trade helped to create a state that some Russian historians, most prominently Pavel Miliukov, called "hypertrophic" or "hyperactive" (Emmons 1999). However, manifestations of this role of the state were different in different periods and regions. In Novgorod, fur merchants created a primitive republic that was able to sign defense contracts with the prince. In Moscow, the merging of trade and protection went much further, with Ivan the Terrible trading fur himself and granting "privileges" to others. Providing a lion's share of the state's disposable income, the fur trade played its role in financing military campaigns, diplo­matic activities, and even religious treaties of the state. Upon the arrival of a Russian envoy to the ruler's court in the southern steppes, he would disburse pelts to the ruler and his nobles. In the seventeenth century, a good present would consist of 40 sable furs, one marten coat, and several other coats of lesser value (Khodarkovsky 2002: 66). Internal consumption of the fur was also significant. When silver was scarce, fur played the role of currency. There were periods when officials of the Muscovite state, officers in the army, and doctors in the court received half their salaries in fur (Pavlov 1972: 102). The profitability of colonies has been a subject of much debate, but there is no doubt that Siberia was very profitable. A Siberian scholar com­pared the effect of the fur trade on Russia's economy with the flood of silver that came to Europe from the New World in the sixteenth century (see Pokshishevskii and krotov 1951: 57).

After the termination of Hansa shipping from Novgorod, the Siberian pelts were delivered through Moscow to Leipzig, their dis­tribution base in Europe, over land. Though the Hansa had other goods to trade over the Baltic, its collapse in the sixteenth century followed the changing routes of the Russian fur trade. In the 1660-70s, the trade in furs sharply fell, which coincided with the start of the inflation that lasted through the Time of Troubles (Kliuchevsky 1959). With the depletion of animals, trappers and hunters were moving to new areas in the east. Looking for squirrel, beaver, sable, martin, ermine, sea otter, and other wonders of the north, the Russians moved farther and farther into the north-eastern corners of Eurasia, all the way to Kamchatka and then to Alaska. In the late seventeenth century, the state monopolized the export trade in all furs and the domestic trade in sables and black foxes (Fisher 1943: 65). These measures did not help; the trade was in decline. Afanasii Shchapov's statistics of the Muscovite "gifts" to foreign powers demonstrated that, through the seventeenth century, the share of sable in these collections was diminishing (1906: 2/330-2). As he formulated it, the depletion of the "zoological wealth" caused the crisis of the Russian state. Shchapov tells how hunters, dressers, tradesmen, and drivers strove to find new ways of subsistence. The ecological disaster turned adventurists into peasants, a long process that took place over generations, some of whom barely survived the transition. It was equally bad for the Russian state, whose infrastruc­ture was dependent on fur. When hare replaced sable in the Kremlin treasury, the Moscow period of Russian history approached its end.

Fed by the fur trade, the state experimented with new commodities and institutions. Hemp, iron, and, finally, wheat replaced fur in Russian exports. Oprichnina, serfdom, and, finally, imperial bureau­cracy became substitutes for the fur trade network. However, the state remained, or strived to remain, hyperactive. Its institutions flourished when they could develop a political economy that provided the resource-bound income that was largely independent of people's labor. These were periods when, as Kliuchevsky put it, "the state grew swollen and the people sick" (1956: 3/12). There were also periods when it was the state that was sick. Establishing their trade with Archangel in 1555, the British were interested in timber, wax, cordage, and other forest products; fur comprised a minor part of the trade (Bushkovitch 1980: 68). King James estimated the value of the region high enough to consider its outright colonization in 1612-13, when the Polish troops and stateless Cossacks took Moscow (Dunning 1989; Kagarlitsky 2003). Then, the Volga merchant, Kuzma Minin, saved Russia from default and defeat by financing the war effort from the revenue of the salt trade, a harbinger of the mining economy to come. When the troubles were over, the hopes for commerce were projected onto the south-west rather than the north-east. Expansionism replaced the prudence of the Muscovite state in respect to the steppes (Boeck 2007). Even more importantly, the state experimented with new practices of controlling and disciplining the population. Wheat, the commodity of the future, required much more labor than fur, and of a very different quality.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the share of fur in Russia's budget was small, but it still dominated the country's exports to China (Pavlov 1972: 119; Foust 1969: 344). Changes in both production and consumption were involved in this decline. Internationally, the Russian fur now competed with North American fur, which was cheaper because of lower transportation costs and customs fees. Moreover, fur was losing out to wool, which was at the peak of its success in Europe and the Americas. Converting a state monopoly into a royal one, Catherine II moved the fur trade from the Siberian Chancellery to the Personal Cabinet - her private treasury (Slezkine 1994: 67). To a certain extent, the collections of the Hermitage were financed from the revenue that came from Siberian pelts. In this enlightened era, the fur trade was discussed in terms of economic mercantilism, which called for state monopolies in colonial trade. In his comments on the Instruction by Catherine II, Denis Diderot wrote that in order to get rich by trade, a state should maintain a monopoly if its source is far away and there is no law in that land. In Russia, that meant Siberia and its fur. Diderot was writing these comments while returning from his visit to St. Petersburg and receiving his salary from Catherine's Personal Cabinet (1992: 135, 159). Even by the end of nineteenth century, the fur tribute comprised more than 10 percent of the Cabinet income (Znamenski 2007: 125).

Sable was gone and squirrel was out of fashion. But then came news from an expedition of Captain James Cook about the sea otter. Cook's sailors traded several pelts on the east coast of Australia for a few glass beads each, and then sold them on to the Chinese in Canton for two thousands pounds. Published in 1784, this story caused new British and French expeditions to Alaska. Catherine the Great commissioned the young, British-trained captain Grigory Mulovsky to head a Russian expedition. George Forster, a participant of Cook's expedition and the author of its best-selling account, agreed to take part in it. But with the start of still another Russo-Swedish war, the expedition was canceled; Mulovsky was killed in action (King 2008). Later voyages found the sea otter in abundance and Chinese customers in waiting. In 1802, Johann von Krusenstern was the first Russian captain to circumnavigate the world, though the reason for his expedition was still the same: fur (Foust 1969: 321). Founded in 1799, the Russian-American Company traded fur for the next half-century, after which quick depletion of the sea otter brought it to a close; the company never made a profit. It was fur alone that attracted the government in St. Petersburg to Alaska and California.

In 1867, the company was liquidated and the imperial domains in North America were sold to the US.