FROM THE EDITORS:

More and more often the question of the colonial nature of the imperial and Soviet past is invoked across the post-Soviet realm. Ukrainian intellectuals and their colleagues from Eastern and Central Europe, representatives of the former Central Asian Soviet republics and non-Russian regions of the Russian Federation often see their peoples as formerly colonized by the Russian Empire and the USSR. At the same time, it would be difficult to find an intensive and thorough appropriation of the research agenda of postcolonial studies in the way it exists today in the world. To start our discussion we ask the participants to reflect on the reasons for this paradoxical situation. Do you think that the convergence of research methods in the respective studies of overseas colonial and contiguous empires can yield the benefit of enriching our understanding of how empires functioned in Eurasia?
In your view, is it possible to transplant the contemporary research agenda of colonial and postcolonial studies to the Russian and post-Soviet context? Which fields of inquiry are particularly in need of modernization of research agenda that could be achieved by infusing their questions with postcolonial reflections and critique? Which specific areas of Russian imperial/Soviet history can be successfully problematized with the help of postcolonial studies? What could be the prospects for the application of such concepts as “intimate domains,” “carnal knowledge,” etc. to the context of Russian and Soviet history? Alternatively, can it be said that the system of Russian colonialism glossed over the domain of the intimate, resulting in underdevelopment of this conceptual apparatus as a consequence of the historical state of affairs?
The study of social knowledge in contemporary historiography of colonialism produced two contradictory effects: the reification of metropole-colony boundary and the revision of that boundary with the effect of reframing key concepts of European history (such as “class” in British history). Is there a danger of reifying the borders between the “metropole” and “colonies” in Russian and Soviet imperial experiences in the framework of postcolonial frame of reference? Alternatively, which concepts of Russian historiography are the best candidates for intellectual critique and conceptual shift in the framework of postcolonial inquiry?

ADRIENNE EDGAR, University of California, Santa Barbara, US

My own field, the history of Central Asia in the Soviet period, would benefit from the judicious application of small doses of postcolonial theory and methodology. Central Asian scholars and government officials often describe their region as having been under colonial rule in the Soviet era, while paradoxically continuing to use a Soviet lens to view specific aspects of this history. One obvious example is the perpetuation of Soviet-era understandings of nationhood in the contemporary national (and nationalizing) republics of Central Asia. As a number of scholars have noted, the boundaries and ethnic categories that originated under Soviet rule have been carried over for the most part uncritically into the post-Soviet era and are frequently treated today as both primordial and eternal. This is perhaps understandable, given the need of newly independent states to create a myth of national origins and a sense of common identity, but it has the unfortunate effect of inhibiting local scholarly inquiry into the construction and perpetuation of these national identities.
A second and less often discussed realm involves the so-called intimate domains of marriage, family, and sexual intimacy. In my view, this field in particular could benefit from the infusion of questions and insights from post-colonialism. The study of “ethnic intermarriage” was virtually a cottage industry in the postwar Soviet Union, with intimacy across ethnic lines continually assessed and celebrated as an indicator of ethnic harmony and convergence. Sociological studies of intermarriage continue to be conducted today in some former Soviet republics, with the questions asked (who is most likely to intermarry? Which passport identity do their children choose?) reflecting the Soviet understanding of – and in some cases the Soviet valorization of – intermarriage. Not just intermarriage itself, but the Soviet interest in, cultivation of, and rhetoric about intermarriage should be subjected to critical scrutiny. What was the Soviet state hoping to achieve by promoting intermarriage? What does the official rhetoric about intermarriage tell us about the strength of ethnic categories in the postwar period, changing conceptions of gender roles, and the existence, real or potential, of a “Soviet” identity? In addition, the very idea of “interethnic marriage,” which relies on the reification of Soviet-defined ethnic categories, needs to be analyzed critically.
There is a vast and growing literature on interethnic intimacy in the European colonial periphery, North America, and Latin America. Cultural historians and anthropologists have shown that rulers of multiethnic societies everywhere have sought to regulate the social and sexual interactions of the diverse ethnic groups under their purview.^[1] The leaders of the Soviet Union were no exception. Yet the work on this topic done by scholars of colonialism and postcolonialism has found little resonance either in the former Soviet Union or among Western scholars studying the region.
Although I am arguing here for the relevance of postcolonial studies to the Eurasian field, I would also urge scholars in Russian and Soviet history to be cautious about the wholesale importation of ideas developed in other contexts. The result of viewing the Soviet Union through the postcolonial lens may be to highlight differences rather than similarities with other empires and multiethnic states. I have argued elsewhere that Soviet policies of female “emancipation” in Central Asia more closely resembled the state-led modernization of neighboring Muslim nation-states than the policies of British and French imperial rulers. Analyzing interethnic intimacy in a postcolonial framework may similarly find that the practices and goals of Soviet intermarriage policy had little in common with the regulation of intimacy in European colonies. Nevertheless, I would argue that the comparison is still worth pursuing for the insights it may produce.

SONJA LUEHRMANN, Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

1. In my understanding, the point of applying postcolonial theory to a field of history is not to make claims about having been victimized by colonization. If we think of its various inspirations from Indian Subaltern Studies, the involvement of Stuart Hall and others in British Cultural Studies, and Latin American critiques of dependency theory, then postcolonial theory is perhaps most fruitfully thought of as a field of debate about the political stakes of knowledge, rather than as a particular body of theoretical concepts or methodological approaches. This means that simply transferring to Russian/Soviet history terminology commonly associated with postcolonial approaches, such as “subaltern,” “alterity,” “margins,” etc. would be something quite different than recreating the critical momentum that provided the impetus for the creation of these terms.
To be more specific, it seems to me that one of the major claims about the politics of knowledge made by postcolonial analysts has been that there is something inherently liberating about deconstructing the categories that a political discourse is built on. The resulting questioning of categories such as whiteness, Orient/Occident, femininity/masculinity has ensured that analyses of imperial practices of rule went hand in hand with self-reflexive critiques of scholarly practices. I am very sympathetic to the underlying idea that we should try to challenge our own intellectual comfort zones, but suspect that the amount of hope invested in deconstruction as a liberating practice owes much to the pathos of the western European and North American New Left, with its discovery that “the personal is political.” It seems problematic to directly transfer this understanding of what intellectual critique is all about to the post-Soviet context, where we are dealing with the history of a regime that itself claimed that personal affairs mattered politically, and were hence subject to political control.
While I do not mean to say that the critique of habitual categories has no appeal in the post-Soviet context, my doubts are partly based on my experience in 1990s Germany, where public intellectuals from East and West often seemed to have a hard time talking to each other. It seems to me that if there was to be a “convergence of research methods” in the study of empires east and west, postcolonial studies could benefit as much from taking seriously the historical reality of political formations that were based on ideas of liberation, equality, and mass political mobilization, and from asking how this reality might challenge what we as scholars think of as liberating and as oppressive.

2. I would not equate postcolonial studies in general with studies of the intimate, although that is certainly one of the dynamic areas of development at the moment. But if we use this area as an example, it seems to me that studies of intimate domains of contact between colonizers and colonized get their critical edge from the fact that such intimacy has been denied in the self-representations of many western European overseas empires (most notably the British), and also in self-representations of U.S. society, with its history of anti-miscegenation legislation, one-drop rules for excluding people from being counted as “white,” etc. It is in this historical context of denial of the intimate, and also perhaps in the context of scholarly reifications of the boundary between colonizer and colonized, that the approaches championed by Ann Stoler and others gain their critical importance.
If, by contrast, we look at Russian imperial historiography, then perhaps intimacy has been overrepresented rather than underrepresented. During the Soviet period, terms like osvoenie and sblizhenie suggested that the Russian conquest of Eurasian lands had consisted of little else than the establishment of intimate ties between ordinary Russians and the local inhabitants. I do not think that the answer would be to artificially draw strict boundaries between colonizers and colonized. But perhaps the critical edge that would challenge received ways of thinking about history would lie somewhere else than in a focus on the intimate. How about, for instance, an approach that focuses on institutions of rule at various local, regional and empire-wide levels and shows their entanglements with each other?

3. In my current research in the Volga region, I see a danger of reified talk about Russian colonizers vs. colonized non-Russians more on the level of the discourse of political activists, not so much in the historiography. Thinking about such a region as the Middle Volga, with its long history of Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic villagers living in close proximity at the crossroads of different imperial state formations, I have found regional approaches most helpful. A view of regional imperial governance inspired by such people as Anatolii Remnev and Jane Burbank, for instance, does not force us to make a priori assumptions about the role played by ethnic differences, but allows us to be mindful of the presence of imperial institutions in the region and the different relationships that imperial subjects had to these institutions based on their estate, religion, language, gender, place of residence etc.
Going back in time to Soviet-era historiography, we may find some interesting concepts in the work of the revisionist Marxist school of the 1960s that centered at the Sector of Methodology at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, around people like Mikhail Gefter and Liudmila Danilova. Their studies of mnogoukladnost’, for instance, stand in conversation with studies of the articulation of different modes of production as they were applied to Latin America and Africa by such western neo-Marxists as Claude Meillassoux. Both could be fruitfully combined in the study of how the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union “articulated with” different political and economic systems at the local level. This would be an example of what I meant in my answer to the first question, when I wrote that postcolonial study has as much to learn from Russian/Soviet historiography as Russian historiography has to learn from postcolonial studies.

4. My published work has concerned Russian colonialism in nineteenth-century Alaska and religious diversity in the Soviet and post-Soviet Volga region. I thus see myself as someone who is interested in Russian and Soviet approaches to governing ethnically and religiously diverse populations, but not always as someone who is committed to postcolonial visions of the political stakes of knowledge. At its best, I see postcolonial scholarship as a struggle to create free spaces for knowledge that, in some respect, goes against the grain of comfortable ways of conceptualizing history and society. Among scholars committed to such endeavors, I wish that Russia and Eastern Europe, and in particular the decades of “actually existing socialism,” received more attention and were allowed to challenge some common certainties about the meaning of “liberation.”
I find it harder to assess Russian historiography from my position as a half-anthropologist, half-historian trained in an interdisciplinary program. There are interesting developments among anthropologists and other social scientists studying what is referred to as postsocialism, who are reflecting on how the “post” in postsocialism and the “post” in postcolonialism are similar and different. I take both “posts” as invitations to integrate serious study of the past with attention to its present reverberations, and certainly hope that these characteristics are true of post-Soviet, post-imperial Russian history.

СЕРГЕЙ АБАШИН, старший научный сотрудник отдела Средней Азии и Казахстана, Институт этнологии и антропологии РАН, Москва, Россия

Средняя Азия в составе Российской империи и СССР – тема, пожалуй, наиболее близкая к колониальным и постколониальным исследованиям. Мы без труда находим здесь и разные формы доминирования со стороны колонизаторов, и разные формы сопротивления со стороны колонизируемых, и ориентализм, и создание европоцентристских классификаций/категоризаций, и подчинение “тела” новым технологиям контроля, и т.д. Многочисленные параллели между развитием Средней Азии за последние 150-200 лет и развитием, например, британо-французских колониальных территорий в Африке и Южной/Юго-Восточной Азии настолько очевидны, что вопрос о возможности и целесообразности их сравнения в рамках каких-то единых концептуальных схем, на мой взгляд, не стоит.
Из несомненных плюсов такого сравнительного анализа – более внимательное и более чувствительное отношение к голосам тех, кого советские и российские исследования не замечали, чьи “маленькие” судьбы, интересы и желания казались маргинальными по отношению к “большим” событиям (войны, революции, перестройки) и “большим” проектам (империя, нация, модернизация, социализм).
Парадокс заключается, однако, в том, что в рамках того пространства, которое всё чаще сегодня называется Евразией, Средняя Азия занимает своеобразное и в некотором смысле даже исключительное положение. Ясная граница между “Западом” и “Востоком”, которую можно было легко сконструировать по отношению к этой периферии, делала незаметными аналогичные границы в других частях страны/империи, где различия между “восточными” и “западными” чертами становились более проблематичными, а значит, более проблематичным выглядел сугубо колониальный характер отношений власти и подчинения. Таким образом, очевидность применимости колониальных и постколониальных рамок для среднеазиатского случая ещё сильнее подчеркивает неочевидность каких-либо обобщений, сделанных на этом примере, для Российской империи и СССР в целом.
Наименее очевидным является, например, утверждение о том, что если в советской Средней Азии мы находим явные признаки колониализма, то это означает, что Советский Союз был колониальной империей. Многие политические, экономические, образовательные, культурные и прочие проекты, которые разрабатывались и одобрялись в советскую эпоху в Москве, не носили специально колониального характера, но в среднеазиатском контексте могли применяться или рассматриваться разными социальными акторами как инструменты подавления и управления со стороны “метрополии”. Как выйти из этого концептуального тупика, как соединить локальную точку зрения (из Средней Азии) с более широкой перспективой – я сейчас сказать не решусь.
Тем не менее мне ясно, что колониальная и постколониальная концептуальная традиция не даёт исчерпывающего объяснения всего, что происходило в Евразии, включая Среднюю Азию, по крайней мере – и я буду очень осторожным – в XX столетии. Безусловно полезная в качестве методологии вскрытия отношений неравенства и доминирования, она не позволяет описать всю сложную картину взаимодействия людей и сообществ на евразийском пространстве, все интересы и альянсы, которые возникали здесь в советскую эпоху, и все их эффекты и последствия, которые мы наблюдаем уже в постсоветское время.

SUMMARY:

Sergey Abashin asserts that Russian/Soviet Central Asia is the most pure “colonial” case in Russian/Soviet history that can be described within the postcolonial paradigm. An application of this paradigm would bring to the fore voices of those historical agents who were silenced, marginalized and misrepresented by the governing historical narratives. However, a problem arises when one considers how typical the Central Asian “borderland” was for the empire and whether the boundary between “Europe” and “Asia” was as clear in the other parts of what is now called Eurasia. It would be wrong to conclude that, because we see in Central Asia the obvious elements of colonial policies, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union were colonial empires. Many of the projects that were not originally colonial in design or intent acquired colonial elements in the course of their implementation in Central Asia. While a useful tool for uncovering mechanisms of inequality and domination, postcolonial theory alone cannot account for different political, social and cultural conjunctions in Eurasia

ELENA GAPOVA, Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at European Humanities University (Belarus, currently in exile in Lithuania); Michigan University

1. I am not sure what the contribution of applying the postcolonial critique is going to be. Perhaps it will be an understanding of how Eurasian empires really functioned, or how intellectuals, while rethinking the past, at the same time construct the present and function in it.
I see the appropriation of the postcolonial agenda in my part of the world as an ambivalent phenomenon, which is partially inspired by what happens in the present, rather than in history. The origin of this criticism is very much in the structural position of post-Soviet intellectuals in the global symbolic market or, to be true to where they really are, off its center. The intellectual curtain is more sophisticated than the iron one was. To enter the prestigious and very much desirable “global” space of ideas, intellectual exchange and socially recognized positions to become a player in this intellectual field, one needs some cultural capital. One’s social analysis and cultural criticism has to be presented in a form that resonates with Western academia and is able to penetrate the “censorship,” to use the term of P. Bourdieau, of the symbolic field in general. Postcolonial theory, which was devised by a very special community of scholars who were born in the “colonies” but educated in the best Western schools, is thus a very Western product. It can, therefore, play the role of overcoming this “censorship.”
I am not suggesting that post-Soviet intellectuals “consciously” apply a theory they do not believe in, of course. I see this “appropriation” of someone else’s theory to describe one’s own past more in the Foucaldian sense, which involves identity construction at the same time as producing a discourse. I see this theory being developed by post-Soviet scholars who either attended Western universities or who have moved to the West. “Homegrown” scholars are rarely the proponents of postcolonial theory, and I see some deep reasons for that.
Purely technically, “we” have never been colonized by the West, but the way things are taking shape now, it is in relation to the West as the powerful other that post-socialist intellectuals behave as “postcolonial subjects,” looking for acceptance. And postcolonial theory, with its strong appeal to “social justice,” is definitely a tool.
2. Let me start with an example. Several years ago I was invited to teach a course on “gender and (post)colonialism” at a summer school on postcolonial theory in Kyrgyzstan. I met some wonderful people among the students (and organizers), who were university professors from all over (post-Soviet) Central Asia, while the lecturers, teaching them about postcoloniality, were “white” Europeans (from Russia, Belarus, and the US). The whole school was made possible with Western money. There was some deep irony in that, which was aggravated even more as we were driving to the site of the school (organized at Issyk-Kul lake in the mountains) through post-Soviet devastation of crumbling roads and buildings and children selling cheap Chinese goods at bus stops. It looked so much the third world. At one point there was a grey concrete wall surrounding a dirty, unpaved marketplace and the slogan inscribed on the wall read “14 years of Kyrgyz independence!”
But the people there had never asked for “independence,” and many in the villages even asked: “Do tell me, when are you going to restore the Soviet Union?” because with “independence” their life actually worsened. The most suitable concept for the social analysis of that situation would be “class” (or economic inequality), and it looked like “independence” and the motif of “postcoloniality” (“now we are independent and can be the masters of our own land and our own lives”) were used to actually disguise what was going on. I felt like I was seeing a “false consciousness” built, not deconstructed.
I do think that postcolonial theory can be a useful concept to analyze the post-Soviet situation, but only if it is used critically, as a model for the analysis of power, rather than a set of ready categories.
3. I do not believe I am qualified enough to answer the question about Russian historiography, but it seems that at a time when the new Eurasian nation-states are re-writing their national histories, the issue that has definitely emerged is the definition of what constitutes “our” and how to delineate common pasts in terms of “this was ours, and this was yours.” How can we delineate boundaries if the concept of skin color or race too often makes no sense and the “colonizer” and “colonized” often went to the same schools, lived in the same apartment buildings, ate the same food and intermarried in huge numbers? I am not saying that in that situation there were no power relations and no concept of the “other,” of course. However, I am interested in how exactly these concepts functioned under very different circumstances.

SUMMARY

Редакция Ab Imperio обратилась к историкам и социологам, работающим с постколониальными моделями на российском материале, с рядом вопросов: почему вопреки популярности постколониальной риторики на постсоветском пространстве постколониальная исследовательская парадигма слабо востребована исследователями России и Евразии; можно ли ожидать серьезного приращения нашего знания об империи в случае изменения этой ситуации? Если перенос постколониальных подходов на российский и советский материал возможен, в каких областях знания и применительно к каким проблемам он наиболее желателен; каковы перспективы обращения специалистов по истории Российской империи/СССР к изучению интимной сферы, “телесного знания”, межрасовых и межэтнических союзов и пр.; не способствует ли историческая специфика Российской империи и СССР маргинализации этих тем? Логика развития постколониальной критики приводила не только к изучению зон контактов и взаимных влияний, но и к новому дискурсивному утверждению границ между метрополией и колонией; может ли рассмотрение истории России и СССР в постколониальной перспективе привести к аналогичному результату? С другой стороны, какие концепции российской/советской историографии должны быть подвергнуты деконструкции с точки зрения постколониального подхода?

ЭДРИЕНН ЭДГАР считает плодотворным применение “малых доз” постколониальных подходов для понимания советского прошлого, в частности – советской политики в Средней Азии. Так, в этом ключе следует интерпретировать использование современными среднеазиатскими учеными и политиками созданных в советские годы национальных идентичностей и примордиалистских представлений о природе национального (вопреки обращенной на Советский Союз антиколониальной риторике). Наиболее богатые результаты применение постколониальной теории дает в области изучения “интимных доменов” (см. статью Эдгар в настоящем номере). В то же время Эдгар предостерегает от механического заимствования подходов, разработанных для иных контекстов и на ином материале. Так, советская политика в Средней Азии, направленная на “освобождение женщины”, более близка государственной политике соседних мусульманских национальных государств, нежели колониальным практикам Британской и Французской империй. Столь же отличается советская политика в области смешанных браков от политики регулирования интимной сферы в европейских империях. Тем не менее Эдгар считает, что само сравнение в рамках постколониальной парадигмы необходимо, поскольку оно способно приводить к неожиданным открытиям.

СОНЯ ЛЮРМАНН склонна воспринимать постколониальную теорию не как набор теоретических положений и методов, но как возникшую в конкретном политическом контексте дискуссию о политических основаниях и претензиях знания, и в этом смысле перенос принятых в этой дискуссии категорий (“субалтерн”, “маргинал” и пр.) на российский/советский материал не воспроизводит оригинальный политический и интеллектуальный контекст дискуссии. Деконструкция знания и интимной сферы как политики, по мнению Люрманн, лежит в центре постколониальной дискуссии. Вряд ли продуктивно переносить эту деконструкцию на режим, который открыто признавал и провозглашал политизацию интимности и знания. Изучение “интимных доменов” имеет принципиальное значение для понимания, прежде всего, британского и американского колониализма и расизма, поскольку в саморепрезентации этих обществ межрасовые интимные контакты отрицались. Советские нарративы освоения Россией Евразии описывали его как “сближение”, “слияние”, т.е. признавали наличие интимного компонента и делали границу между колонизатором и колонизуемым менее критической. Поэтому изучение “интимных доменов” в российском/советском имперском опыте менее важно, чем, скажем, изучение властных институтов и политики этничности на региональном уровне. Постколониальная теория в данном случае менее продуктивна, чем советская ревизионистская концепция многоукладности экономического развития либо неомарксистская модель экономического развития Латинской Америки и Африки (различные модусы производства).

СЕРГЕЙ АБАШИН – см. русский оригинал.

ЕЛЕНА ГАПОВА считает, что принятие постсоветскими интеллектуалами постколониального подхода будет означать не столько прорывы в изучении прошлого, сколько адаптацию к структурной ситуации на современном интеллектуальном рынке, где постколониальная парадигма может рассматриваться как “символический капитал”, обеспечивающий международную интеграцию и признание. Гапова ссылается на опыт своего участия в “летней школе” на тему “Гендер и (пост)колониализм”, организованной несколько лет тому назад при поддержке западных фондов в Киргизстане. Слушателями школы являлись преподаватели университетов бывшей советской Средней Азии, преподавателями – “белые европейцы” из России, Беларуси и США; окружающая реальность соответствовала представлениям о “третьем мире”, а население киргизских городков на пути к месту проведения школы грезило восстановлением СССР – на фоне лозунгов во славу обретенной независимости. Гапова считает, что в данном случае постколониальная риторика сознательно используется для того, чтобы затушевать классовую, экономическую природу происходящих процессов. Она призывает к критическому использованию постколониальной теории для понимания политических процессов в постсоветском обществе. По мнению Гаповой, российская/cоветская история демонстрирует, как такие концепции постколониальной теории, как -“свой-чужой”, раса и пр. (и стоящие за ними отношения власти) функционировали в иных, еще не осмысленных постколониальными теоретиками обстоятельствах.