SUMMARY:

This is the authorized translation of a chapter from a new book by Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience (forthcoming from Polity Press, September 2011). In this book, Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conquered foreign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, thereby colonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision of colonization as simultaneously internal and external is crucial for scholars of empire, colonialism, and globalization. Starting with the fur trade, which shaped Russia’s enormous territory, and ending with the Empire’s collapse in 1917, Etkind explores serfdom, the peasant commune, and other institutions of internal colonization. His account brings out the formative role of foreign colonies in Russia, the self-colonizing discourse of Russian classical historiography, and the revolutionary leaders’ illusory hopes for an alliance with the exotic, pacifist sectarians. Transcending the boundaries between history and literature, Etkind examines striking writings about Russia’s imperial experience, from Defoe to Tolstoy and from Gogol to Conrad. The message is historical, theoretical, and literary at once. Postcolonial theory helps us to understand Russian history; Russian literature fills gaps in postcolonial theory.