SUMMARY:

In his article Alexander Etkind scrutinizes the applicability of Said’s theory of Orientalism to the history of Russia and, critically revising the basic premises of that theory, suggests an array of political, cultural, and intellectual phenomena in Russian history that could be placed in and interpreted within the perspective of Orientalism. Etkind starts with recapitulation of Said’s theory, pointing to the well-known fact that it was based on the specifics of the colonial relationships within the French and British modern empires. He notes that historical Orientalism, alon with postcolonial discourse, tends to reify seemingly discrete entities of the colonizing West and the colonized East, thus obscuring national differences among the modern colonial and semi-colonial powers. Applied to a historical variety of colonial and post colonial situations beyond the realm of typical colonial empires, the thesis of Orientalism reveals its core, which, according to Etkind, is a complex of practices designed to create and manipulate the cultural distance, which can be formulated in geographic, racial, ethnic, religious, and class terms. Marrying Said to Gellner, Etkind states that in a traditional society and on a scarcely populated territory of the Russian empire the colonization and orientalization were directed inward rather than outward; that is, the population of the core of the empire was viewed as culturally different (in case of romanticism, as inferiority or superiority) by the westernized elite and subjected to a civilizing mission of the state. Etkind illustrates this thesis by drawing on an array of examples, including the settlement of foreign colonists, the military colonies during the reign of Alexander I, the historiography of “Russian colonization,” and the relationship between external expansion and internal colonization. Tracing the intellectual origins of the thesis on internal colonization, the author turns to Chaadaev and his radical interpretation of the process of Europeanization of Russia as a colonial one. Emphasizing the centrality of intellectual and cultural production for maintaining and manipulating cultural distance, Etkind analyzes the discourse of “the people” as developed both by Russian intelligentsia of the populist creed and in Russian ethnography, suggesting that beginning with the Slavophiles and ending with the collapse of the Ancien Regime in 1917 the educated and political elite of Russia fell under the influence of a postcolonial attitude toward the colonized people, which contributed to the “internal” decolonization of Russia. In conclusion, Etkind argues that colonialism and the associated practices of cultural distancing returned in a cyclical manner during the Soviet period.