Internal Colonization: The Russian Empire One Hundred Years Later History Miscellaneous. Internal Colonization: A Model to Unfold Who were the main participants in internal colonization

Internal colonization- settlement and economic development of empty outlying lands of the country.

Medieval Europe

In the history of Russia

A number of modern researchers (A. Etkind, D. Uffelman, etc.) consider not the economic, but the ideological and mental side of internal colonization in Russia. Questions are raised about the antagonistic relations between the imperial center and the periphery, about the mutual perceptions of each other between the authorities and the people. The center, in the conditions of imperial internal colonization, views the periphery as “natural” and wild, in need of cultivation and civilizing transformation. The revolution in this vein is seen as an attempt to overcome the contradictions of internal colonization, but soon its new stage begins - the Soviet one.

A. Etkind writes:

Colonization always has two sides: active and passive; the side that conquers, exploits and benefits, and the side that suffers, suffers and rebels. But the cultural distance between the metropolis and the colony does not always coincide with the ethnic distance between them.
The situation we are interested in is located precisely at the point of transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one. For agrarian societies, as Russia was before Peter and to a great extent remained after him, the main differences are built between the cultures of the rulers and the people - linguistic, ethnic, religious, even sexual. Industrialization gives birth to nationalism as a “marriage between state and culture,” the result of their mutual attraction and harmonization. The nationalization of agrarian culture, repeatedly divided into classes, provinces, communities, dialects, estates, sects, is always self-colonization: the people turn into a nation, the peasants into the French. The process moves from the capitals to the borders, stopping only where it encounters a counter process of equal strength. The only peculiarity of Russia was its geographical extent and underpopulation, which made it difficult for the movement of people and symbols, as well as the special configuration of cultural characteristics that were subject to mixing. The overriding factor remained the cultural distance between the upper and lower classes, inherited from an agrarian society. The two worlds (the state and the rural community) were separated by an abyss, but all the resources of the state, financial and human, came from the communities. Communication between them, if possible, turned out to be distorted, risky and limited.

From the editor. We are publishing a transcript of the speech Alexandra Etkind, professor of Russian literature and cultural history at the University of Cambridge, held on December 10, 2012 at the Higher School of Economics with the support of the National Democrat club.

Alexander Etkind: It's great to give a lecture when such a large audience is almost full. I'm not spoiled by large student gatherings. In Cambridge, when I give lectures, if 15 people come, then that’s great, but here you can’t even count. My lecture is based on two books. One of them is now being translated from English into Russian, this is my own book, it will be called in the Russian translation “Internal Colonization: The Imperial Experience of Russia.” It will be published by UFO publishing house next year. The second book has already been published, and there was a presentation of this very thick book in Polit.ru. The discussion was quite informative, I think. This book is called “There, Inside. Practices of internal colonization in the cultural history of Russia." This is a collective collection - there are 28 authors and 3 editors: Dirk Uffelman, Ilya Kukulin and me. The articles were written by colleagues who participated in the conference on internal colonization and then contributed to this collection. As you can see, among historians, cultural scientists, literary and film scholars working on Russia, all over the world and in Russia itself, there is a very serious interest in this topic.

Researching the imperial period, scholars have generated two stories, two narratives. One story is that of a great country that competed successfully, if not always evenly, with other European powers, produced a brilliant literature, and experienced unprecedented social experimentation. The other story is the story of economic backwardness, unlimited violence, poverty, illiteracy, despair and collapse. And what’s interesting is that many researchers subscribe to both of these narratives, both of these stories at the same time. But it is not good for a scientist to believe simultaneously in two stories that contradict each other.

You can believe, of course, but we need to come up with a mechanism or a metaphor or a meta-narrative that coordinates these two stories and allows us to move from one to the other so that they, both narratives, continue to retain their meaning and at the same time somehow be connected to one another. So I propose, as such a metaphor or mechanism or this or that, we will discuss this later, the idea of ​​​​internal colonization - a process that is partly paradoxical, partly very understandable, which went on for a large part of the imperial period, began even before it, ended, I think after it, or did not end at all: the process in which the state colonized its own people.

Let's start with the 19th century, since it is better known to us all. In the 19th century, Russia was a colonial empire. It competed on equal terms with the British Empire, with the Austrian or Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the French Empire. And at the same time it was a colonized territory, like the Congo or India. In its various aspects and at different periods, Russian culture was both the subject and object of Orientalism. The paths of colonization lay outside of Russia, Russia was expanding, I will talk about this now, but they also went inside the Russian hinterland. If external routes went to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific region, they also went to the lands surrounding Novgorod, Tula, Orenburg. It was in these deep and middle territories that the empire settled Western colonists and organized military settlements. Military settlements are a story you probably remember from high school. In the Alexander era, these settlements were called colonies in government correspondence, which was in French.

In these middle, deep territories, the Russian nobility owned millions of souls and punished millions of bodies. In these middle territories, imperial experts discovered the most unusual communities and collected the most exotic folklore. Russian pilgrims, ethnographers, populists went to these middle deep territories of Russia in their search for extraordinary groups that they tried to find among the Russian people. These are all characteristic phenomena of colonialism: missionary work, exotic travel, ethnographic research. In Russia in the 19th century, they were directed inside Russian villages rather than outside Russian territory or to overseas countries.

Russia constantly, although unevenly, expanded, but by expanding and colonizing the newly conquered outlying territories, it colonized its own people. These two processes, external colonization and internal colonization, occurred simultaneously and in parallel; they competed with each other. The empire's energy and resources have always been limited, even in Russia. We need to explore the interaction between these two processes, imagining them as two communicating vessels, because, so to speak, population and, relatively speaking, colonizing energy have always been limited.

The idea of ​​internal colonization is, of course, very controversial. In general, the very idea of ​​colonization in relation to the Russian Empire is relatively new. Even two decades ago, the idea that Ukraine or, say, Central Asia were colonies, or even that Poland or Finland or Siberia were colonies of the Russian Empire, these ideas, although they have a very deep historiography, caused angry irritation or resistance on both sides of the ironclad. curtain In the 1990s, postcolonial experts debated the reasons why they would or would not apply their postcolonial concepts to the then emerging post-Soviet countries. Modern literature has partly solved these problems, but has created new ones, focusing on ethnicity, nationalism and sovereignty.

Many researchers began to not only ignore, but to attach less importance to those peculiar institutions of the Russian Empire that were not directly related to ethnicity or sovereignty, but determined the life of northern Eurasia for several centuries. And it was these institutions that led this part of the world to the upheavals of the 20th century. But while the idea of ​​internal colonization is paradoxical and seems fresh, it is not entirely new. In particular, a large chapter in my book concerns how this idea was discussed and formulated by the classics of Russian history in the 19th century, people like Sergei Solovyov or Vasily Klyuchevsky, when they wrote their famous formula that Russia is a country that is being colonized. But, of course, this was not discussed in postcolonial discussions.

Colonization and serfdom
An important material to which this approach can be applied is Russian serfdom. In the 19th century, serfdom was a central subject of both Russian politics and historiography, that is, not only politicians and economists debated and fought over what to do with serfdom, how to reform it, but historians also continuously studied its history. In current books and even textbooks on Russian history of the 19th century, serfdom is disappearing right before our eyes. If you look at the textbooks that come out, there are fewer and fewer chapters, chapters or sections where there are references to serfdom. What happened to serfdom? We know that serfdom was abolished in Russia approximately in the same years when slavery was abolished in America, that serfdom had a much wider application, the number of serfs was incomparably greater in Russia than the number of black slaves in America. It lasted longer, it had a profound impact and lasting consequences. But in American historiography, the study of slavery and the memory of slavery is a huge area; entire magazines are published devoted to these issues, books, and, again, textbooks. We do not know anything similar regarding serfdom either in Russian or in English. This is a double standard that should not exist in research practice.

I will now illustrate what I want to say. One of the best, or perhaps the best study of serf practices so far, is a book by the American historian Stephen Hawk, which was translated into Russian. This American historian found a perfectly preserved archive of a large estate near Tambov. Tambov, everyone knows, is the black earth region of Russia, a symbol of the Russian hinterland, provincial life in the very heart of Russia. And for some reason the archive of this estate was preserved better than the others, so this American historian was able to calculate and come to interesting conclusions regarding this estate. At the beginning of the 19th century, the diet of the peasants who lived on this black earth estate was in no way inferior to the European level in terms of the amount of fat and so on, all this can be calculated. They ate normally, just as peasants ate in Germany or France at the beginning of the 19th century. But the differences were big. These differences relate to motivation, ownership and management of the estate. Since all the peasants on this estate were serfs, neither the land belonged to them, nor part of the harvest was left to them, and they were not at all interested in working on this land. Therefore, the only thing that could make them work was the threat and actual use of corporal punishment. Accordingly, according to Hawk's data for two years (1826-1828), 79% of the male population of this estate were flogged once, and 24% - 2 times. In addition, to indicate the consequences of this punishment, in case of serious offenses, one part of their head was shaved so that everyone could see that they had been punished.

Let's think about what Tambov is, this very core Russian land. Founded in 1636, Tambov was a fortress or stockade that defended the Muscovite state from what were then believed to be wild tribes that inhabited the land before the Russians arrived there. 1636: this means Tambov was a direct contemporary of such colonial centers of the British Empire as Williamsburg, founded in 1632, the center of Virginia tobacco plantations, or, for example, Cape Town in South Africa, founded later, in my opinion, in 1652. At the same time, no one doubts the colonial nature of Cape Town. But the colonial nature of Tambov sounds amazing. However, it was founded on foreign land with similar purposes, fortified as a military fortress, and used to hold land and start farming, just like any North American tobacco plantation center.

Near Tambov, however, the security situation was very difficult because the nomadic tribes continued to invade, unlike the American Indians, with whom Virginia was establishing more stable relations. Sustainable land use has therefore been difficult. And long after the founding of Tambov, a plantation-type economy developed there with difficulty. Although this estate was located in the center of the country, nevertheless, the delivery of grain to Moscow for sale along rivers and roads, which remained very bad, took many weeks. And, despite the fact that the peasants ate excellently, the landowner was dissatisfied and tried to squeeze out more and more, because the landowner is least interested in subsistence farming, he needs to sell goods on the market, and selling was very difficult even in the middle of the 19th century.

But what’s interesting is that this Tambov estate was not self-sufficient. There was a population decline there as a result of the escape of serfs, and because they were recruited into the imperial army, and for some other reason. And although the peasants there ate well, as Hock shows, their life expectancy was still lower than that of European peasants, perhaps because the medical service was less organized, and perhaps because they were morally dissatisfied. You know that low life expectancy in today's Russia remains a mystery to researchers. And very serious scientists are forced to use such vague concepts as the moral dissatisfaction of the population. Something similar happened there too.

How was the problem of population decline solved? The landowners needed the estate to work, and they transported serfs here near Tambov from their other estates, with less fertile lands. In terrible conditions, peasants, under the threat of the same flogging, were driven across very long distances, transferred on foot or on barges, thus fueling this demography. Here we have many signs of a colonial economy. I won’t list them; I think my conclusion here is clear.

Maritime and continental empires
In 1904, the charismatic Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote that Russian history is the history of a country that is being colonized. The space of this colonization expanded in history along with the expansion of the state. This is a very interesting conclusion and image. The state expanded in different directions, it expanded at different periods to the west or north, east and south, and the space of colonization expanded along with this territory. The question is what is the exact meaning of this formula, what was then understood by colonization, if you look at all the textbooks of Russian history, starting with Sergei Solovyov.

For example, there was such a wonderful person, Matvey Lyubavsky, a student of Klyuchevsky, he was the rector of Moscow University. Then he was imprisoned in the case of historians in 1930, he was in exile in Bashkiria, and there he wrote a large book called “Review of the History of Russian Colonization.” It was published already in modern times, a very interesting book. And Lyubavsky specifically examines different sides of the Russian world - Siberia, Bashkiria, where he wrote this book, or, in a separate chapter, how the Russian Empire colonized Ingria. And Ingria, as you probably know, is the land on which the Russian capital of St. Petersburg was founded, and it was also someone’s land, the land of the Ingrians. And the capital itself was founded on colonial territory, and Matvey Lyubavsky wrote about this very interestingly. State territory, he wrote, was formed by external colonization. And then, when the borders are formed or even when they still continue to move forward, it is time to develop the territory, get to know its population, economic use of both, and, finally, cultural development. These are already matters of internal colonization; So I continue Lyubavsky’s thought.

Now, of course, we understand the word “colonization” completely differently than Russian historians did, from Solovyov to Lyubavsky. There was also a specialist in this field, Evgeniy Tarle, who, by the way, was also imprisoned in the case of historians, but was soon released. He studied European colonialism and imperialism and understood these concepts very critically, in fact much closer to their modern meanings. I don’t use the word “colonialism” at all, because colonialism is an ideology, it’s a word that is loaded with very strong meanings, and colonization is much broader socio-political and geographical processes, we’ll talk about this later. But in any case, there is no doubt that today we understand all these words differently than Solovyov understood in the middle of the 19th century, Klyuchevsky in the early 20th century, Lyubavsky in the 30s of the 20th century.

And the main source in this regard is Edward Said’s internationally famous book “Orientalism”, which exists in Russian translation and is one of the most frequently cited humanities books in the world. Edward Said spoke about colonization and Orientalism in various parts of the world, primarily in the countries of the Arab East, the Maghreb, British India, and French Africa. But Said ignores the Russian Empire as a large part of the world. There's a chapter in my book where I try to figure out what this is all about, going into Said's political views and even into Said's private life. But now I want to talk about something else.

For Said, the idea of ​​colonization is very closely connected with the idea of ​​the romance of sea travel. Colonization in the French Empire and the British Empire took place on ships of the military or merchant fleet, which means that it was necessary to sail across oceans, across one, two, three oceans, to overcome storms and storms. And this romance of sea travel turns out to be key for the literature that Said analyzes; he is a literary critic, like me. But the Russian Empire, we all know, was a land empire, although the Russian Empire had its overseas possessions, and the most important of them was Alaska. But we know that Alaska is almost the only possession of the Russian Empire that this empire gave up of its own free will without coercion by military force or local uprisings.

Land empires, of course, have enormous specifics. In fact, before the advent of the railroad and telegraph, land was less passable than seas and oceans. In times of peace, delivering goods from Arkhangelsk to London by sea was faster and cheaper than delivering goods by land from Arkhangelsk to Moscow. When the Crimean War began, it turned out that delivering goods or troops from Gibraltar to Sevastopol was faster than delivering troops, food, and equipment from the central provinces to Crimea. The distance was approximately the same, but by sea it was easier, more reliable, and ultimately cheaper and safer to travel. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were Russian bases in Alaska, they were engaged in fur production, and this fur had to be delivered somewhere, either to China, or to Central Russia and then to Europe. But the bases in Alaska had to be supplied with food, and cargo was sent there, mainly grain and oil. And there were two ways, the first - from the central provinces it was possible to deliver cargo on horseback through all of European Russia, then through Siberia to Okhotsk and then across the Pacific Ocean to Alaska; or another way - through three oceans, around Europe, then around Africa, because there was no Suez Canal then, around Asia, and so through the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans on ships these cargoes, grain and oil, sailed from St. Petersburg or from Odessa to Alaska. And now the question is: what was faster, more reliable and more profitable? This means that it turned out to be 4 times cheaper to supply Russian bases in Alaska by sea than by land, and by sea it took a year, and by land two or three.

So in fact, the oceans connected, but the land separated. In addition, all sorts of strange peoples lived on land, and the empire had to do something with them. If the state extracted furs, then the local peoples were both an instrument of this production, and a competitor in it, and a participant in enslaving transactions, and a threat to security. If the empire sent goods, then these peoples represented a threat to these goods, but on the other hand, they participated in the delivery of these goods. Somehow these people had to be motivated, they had to be cooperated with, and first they had to be defeated and pacified, imposed with yasak, quitrent or taxes, and sometimes they also had to be resettled or enslaved or baptized or even enlightened or, conversely, think and leave them in their primitive state, or recruit them into the army, or vice versa, decide that they are not capable of serving. But all this did not happen on the oceans, the ocean is the ocean, this is a technical task, not a human task.

Therefore, since we are talking specifically about land colonization, it has three vectors: economic exploitation of a foreign land, political violence, and a complex of special cultural practices that present life on a foreign land as an exotic, fundamentally different life. Colonization combined these different aspects

History of the concept
When we talk about colonization processes, we always see two useful concepts that were introduced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci while he was in prison: hegemony and domination. Gramsci spoke about the Italian south and north and their differences and interactions and the suppression of one part by the other, and therefore he spoke specifically about internal colonization. Cultural hegemony and political dominance, they always interact, correlate or contrast in any process of colonization; in general, this is an interesting and meaningful process.

Let's talk more about internal colonization. When we hear the word “colonization,” we always imagine a certain territory; then the state expands, conquers something, occupies something, and this new land is further colonized. In fact, no definition of colonization states that colonization always occurs outside the imperial territory. Without any violence to the meaning, and this must be understood, we can talk about external and internal colonization. Internal colonization is the application of colonial practices within a political territory, within the political border of a state, not even necessarily an imperial state, possibly a national state.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, various scientists very actively used the concept of internal colonization, not always for plausible purposes. German politicians at the end of the 19th century formulated very ambitious plans for the occupation of Eastern Europe, and this was called, translated from German, “internal colonization.” Why internal? Because they believed, on the basis of reliable or dubious sources, that once in the Middle Ages or under Frederick the Great, the Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic lands belonged to the German Empire, and therefore the new colonization would be internal.

Russian imperial historians used the concept, I have already spoken about this, of self-colonization. My favorite of these historians is Afanasy Shchapov, who had a great influence on Klyuchevsky. I have been studying Shchapov for a long time in various aspects; in my book about sects, I am also a follower of Shchapov. There are other interesting sources. For example, there is a book by the famous polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who went to Siberia in 1915. Speaking about Siberia, which had long been conquered and seemingly colonized, Nansen actively used the concept of colonization; he sometimes spoke of a new colonization. The settlement, development, and enlightenment of Siberian territories was called colonization. At this time, it already made sense to stipulate whether we were talking about external or internal colonization, although Nansen did not do this. Around the same years, Vladimir Lenin, in his book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” referring to his German predecessors, socio-economic historians with a very ambivalent reputation, wrote specifically about internal colonization, even when he spoke about his native Volga region. Hitler also wrote about internal and external colonization, and distinguished between these concepts.

The Russian Revolution occurred, after which the decolonization of the Third World occurred, and the concept, or rather the idea of ​​internal colonization, ceased to be used. Instead, in 1951, Hannah Arendt used the very interesting concept of the colonial boomerang. Colonial boomerang is a similar, but more specific concept. Arendt described processes in which the imperial powers first developed certain practices of suppression and exploitation of the colonies and then, as it were, for the second time transferred these invented and mastered practices to the metropolis. It’s like a boomerang - first empires send new practices to the colonies, then they return to the metropolis. Examples concerned the British Empire. But we can recall the wonderful work of Saltykov-Shchedrin, which is called “Gentlemen of Tashkent”. This is about those officers of the colonial army who in the last third of the 19th century were stationed in Tashkent and then returned to the Russian provinces. They were appointed vice-governors or auditors, and so they brought practices of violence to provinces that were not familiar to them. “Gentlemen of Tashkent” is a very eloquent essay.

After 1968, sociologists reinvented the concept of internal colonization, similar to the concept of the colonial boomerang, in order to apply postcolonial language to the internal problems of the European metropolises and the United States. American sociologist Robert Blauner examined the life of black ghettos in large American cities and urban uprisings as processes of internal colonization. In lectures in 1975-76, French philosopher Michel Foucault used the concept of internal colonization in his study of how colonial patterns of power were moving back from east to west. In 1975, British sociologist Michael Hechter introduced the concept into the canon of sociology in his book on the British Isles. The book focuses on Wales, an ethnically distinct region of England. To colonize, according to Hechter, there was no need to sail to overseas countries; he showed that the practices of colonialism were also applied within the English islands. But what was important for Hechter was the ethnic distance between the colonizers and the colonized, between the English and the Welsh. And, for example, the famous philosopher Jurgen Habermas uses the concept of internal colonization in general in an extremely broad sense as a synonym for modernity or modernization. I don't agree with this. From my point of view, there are big interesting differences between the concept of modernization and the concept of colonization.

In addition, the concept of internal colonization or colonialism was used by the French historian Eugene Weber and the American sociologist Alvin Gouldner, who directly applied it to the study of collectivization in the Soviet Union, by the American anthropologist James Scott in studies of Southeast Asia. And several very important historians of Russia have spoken in recent books about the colonial nature of Russian domestic rule: Marc Ferro, Dominic Lieven, and Timothy Snyder. But, in general, no one has seriously developed this aspect in relation to Russia.

Raw material dependence
In my opinion, the idea of ​​internal colonization is very strongly connected with another important idea that plays a key role in understanding modern Russia - the problem of raw material dependence. You all know how dependent Russia is on oil and gas. Yuri Shevchuk has a great song, “When the Oil Runs Out.” Dmitry Bykov has a novel “ZhD”, I won’t retell it now, it is a very eloquent story of what will happen to Russia if something is invented in Europe that will make oil unnecessary. This is all fiction, fiction, but I found an interesting parallel to the modern raw materials, gas and oil curse, oil curse, in medieval Russian history. In my book there is a chapter about how first the Novgorod state, then the Moscow principality, depended on the export of fur. At first, beavers were caught with traps around Moscow, and around Novgorod, gray squirrels were caught and exported to England and Holland in massive quantities, millions of pelts per year, and in Novgorod there was a trading post of the Hanseatic League, a real colonial institution that actively collaborated with the Novgorod authorities. And the export of squirrels and other furs accounted for a huge part of the profit of both merchants and the state. And in exchange, weapons, iron, wine, luxury goods, and sometimes, when there was a crop failure, grain went to Novgorod - all this was exchanged for several forest products, but, above all, for fur, wax, and tar. But since the squirrel ran out, the Novgorodians moved further north and east to the Ugra land, this is Northern, maybe even to Western Siberia, the squirrel was exported from there by the millions.

And then at some point this fur business, which in its Novgorod version was focused on protein, stopped. And this coincided, of course, with the bankruptcy of the Hansa. The bankruptcy of the Hansa - there were many interesting reasons. First, the trading post left Novgorod, then the Hansa itself was closed, and then Novgorod was occupied. What happened to this squirrel? Some historians who have studied the history of the fur trade believe that the squirrel was hunted down in these vast expanses of Northern Russia and the Urals. And another idea is that the decline of the fur trade coincided with the massive spread of wool in England. After all, squirrel was not an item of luxury consumption, like sable. It was a mass-produced item; some jackets, caftans, and boots were made from it. And when wool began to be knitted in houses, which required some technological breakthroughs related, first of all, to ecology, resources, and deforestation of English forests, wool replaced the squirrel. This means that some new technological invention made the massive export of raw materials unnecessary and undermined the economy of the early Russian state, based on the export of one specific resource.

But after this, the history of the Moscow state began, which also largely depended on fur, but completely different fur - on sable. When Ermak defeated the Siberian Khan, remember this picture by Surikov, after this victory a caravan drove through Siberia, and in it were two thousand sable skins, 500 black fox skins, and some ermine skins. This was the treasure that was found in Siberia. And then, over the course of several centuries, the Russians, especially the Cossacks, found more and more creative methods of combining barter and violence. And with these methods, the Cossacks forced different tribes of Siberia, then the Pacific coast, and then Alaska to extract furs and exchange them, relatively speaking, for beads or weapons.

This is, of course, a very interesting story, and in the end the sable was knocked out, because it is a sable, not a squirrel, and the energy of colonization transferred to Alaska, where the Cossacks took up the sea otter, fur seal and seal. And that’s the only reason Alaska was busy. Look, this gigantic territory was occupied by the Russian state for the purpose of extracting, transporting and exporting fur. Then this fur disappeared or the demand for it fell, and a huge territory remained under the jurisdiction of the Russian authorities. This territory, already conquered, was subject to new, secondary and internal colonization.

For example, the Siberian dissident historian Afanasy Shchapov, who was studying the inventories of furs that were kept in the Moscow Treasury, somewhere near the Faceted Chamber, in the Kremlin, pointed out that on the eve of the Time of Troubles, sables in warehouses were replaced by hares and hare fur. And Shchapov explains quite clearly that this was the economic reason that ultimately led to the Time of Troubles. The Time of Troubles, of course, had many, many different causes, and the depletion of natural resources was one of them. Foreign policy was built on these resources and much more was built. When silver ran out in the Faceted Chamber, and foreign specialists who worked in Moscow had to be paid in silver, they were paid in furs. But in the Time of Troubles, the Russian government had to do something that it had not done before, namely, organize the life of the population on an economically profitable basis. The state’s dependence on raw materials, which is true now and was true then, is like a rainbow that passes by the population. The population doesn’t seem to be needed, you know. This is such a direct union between the state and exotic raw materials somewhere in the distant region of this state, and the population has nothing to do with it. But when the raw materials run out, then the state closely deals with the population.

Indeed, the codification of serfdom and early attempts to squeeze something out of this land took place when the furs ran out or they could no longer be sold. I had to turn to grain. But grain is a completely different resource, grain requires labor, grain requires sedentarization, grain requires long-term crop rotations, and so on, which means grain requires serfdom. This means that the state experimentally introduced institutions that attached peasants to the land and forced them to work on this land by force. Previously, the state dealt with people as soldiers or Cossacks and did not deal with people as peasants, but now it suddenly began to deal with them.

The Shaven Man's Burden
Let's talk a little more about Peter the Great. What did Peter do? Here we come to some key concepts of the idea of ​​internal colonization already in modern times. Just after returning from his European tour, and Peter, as you know, visited the great centers of European empires - Koenigsberg, London, Amsterdam - he founded St. Petersburg on very recently colonized land and issued a decree inviting foreigners to Russia - come, settle, get comfortable .

And on August 26, 1698, Peter issued his famous decree on shaving noble beards. Some voluntarily, some by force - in St. Petersburg and then in all major centers - the nobles had to shave their beards. Look how interesting it is. We all know that Peter shaved his beards; there is no person who does not know this. But I think that it is not so clear that this barbering was selective, that the principle was class, or more precisely, class, that beards were shaved for nobles, and other people, for example, priests were left with beards, peasants were left with beards, there were such people - bourgeois , with whom it was unclear what to do, sometimes they shaved their beards, sometimes not, but in the end they didn’t. This means that this decree on barbering created a class structure where there was none and, moreover, did it on the model of the racial structure of the colonial possessions.

What is race? Race is a visible sign of power relations. For example, the Dutch Empire was founded on colonial practices, here are blacks, here are whites, here are aborigines, here are administrators, they are people of different colors. Barber shaving made the power relations between white people visible to the eye, it was a form of social engineering applied on a massive scale.

But, of course, this system was imperfect. If an American Negro runs away from his plantation, he remains black, but if a serf runs away, he can shave his beard. And this principle of difference did not apply to women. You probably know Kipling’s wonderful expression – “the white man’s burden.” This burden is the essence of colonization, the imperial mission, the civilizing mission. And I came up with a very simple expression - “the burden of a shaven man”, in strict accordance with this Kipling formula.

There is such a wonderful story by Leo Tolstoy “How Much Land Does a Man Need”, a wonderful story, short and very understandable. This means that he is talking about a Russian peasant who began to run out of land somewhere in the Kursk province. And he goes to Bashkiria to get land, and the local Bashkirs treat him very well and say - this is how much you will walk in a day from dawn to dusk, this is how much land you will receive, everything will be yours. And he starts, he runs, then he walks, then he returns with difficulty, having covered much, much ground, and dies. And Tolstoy says: “that’s how much land a person needs,” exactly as much as it takes to bury him.

Or another very instructive story - this is a story, actually a memoir, by Nikolai Leskov “Product of Nature”. Leskov talks about how he was young and how, as a colonial administrator, he accompanied the transport of peasants who were transported from one estate to another. Now, if you read about how black slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean, it looked very similar. But Leskov, this young gentleman, tried, when some peasants fled, to prevent them from being flogged. But the local police officer locked him in his house while the peasants were flogged. So what should Leskov do? He reads books from the library of this policeman, and the policeman has prohibited literature - Herzen and so on, books that teach freedom and equality. But, in the end, Leskov, and this is the end of his story and the end of my lecture, managed to discover that this police officer was in fact not even a police officer, but was simply an impostor. Thank you for your attention.

Discussion after the lecture
Andrey Vorobiev: You know, there is such a concept, a point of view, that Russia is an empire in reverse. The metropolis in Russia, especially during Soviet times, lived worse. A friend of mine who crossed the border of the Pskov region and Estonia entered a store and received a culture shock in 1982. How do you feel about the concept of a “reverse empire”?

A.E.: I remember something similar myself. I call this the reverse imperial gradient. As follows from the ideal model, an empire was usually built so that the imperial people, say the British, would live better than the Indians or Africans. And, as a rule, this was observed, and when it was not observed, the empires were destroyed. But in Russia this imperial gradient was reversed. There are two volumes written by the St. Petersburg historian Boris Mironov, “Social History of Russia.” In them, Mironov provides fairly detailed statistics on the provinces of the Russian Empire, the income and expenses of the empire per capita, based on official statistics, which, at the very least, were kept at the end of the 19th century. It turns out that everything was really the other way around: people in the Baltic provinces or in Siberia or in Poland or in the south of Ukraine, in the Kuban lived better, social statistics show this. At the end of the 19th century, concepts like the devastation of the center were in use - people fled from there, the center was overpopulated, the land did not give birth. The Empire spent incomparably more in the Caucasus than in the center, but it also spent more in Siberia - on schools, on police, on administration.

But far more important than economics is the idea and practice of civil rights. In Britain, people had more rights than people in the British colonies had, this applies, for example, to elections of local authorities or to parliament. In Russia, we know very well that serfdom existed precisely in the central provinces. Klyuchevsky calculated where serfdom existed and where it did not, and said that serfdom developed as a protective belt around Moscow and had a defensive, not economic, significance. There was no serfdom in Siberia, in the Russian north in the Arkhangelsk province it did not exist, in the Baltic countries and in Poland it existed, but it was very underdeveloped. What is serfdom? This is a radical restriction of civil rights that was carried out in relation to the ethnically Russian, religiously Orthodox population: even ethnic Russians who were Old Believers rarely found themselves enslaved.

Kazbek Sultanov, IMLI RAS: Alexander Markovich, I cannot help but take advantage of your presence. Why does Said so carefully and so deliberately avoid such a major player as the Russian Empire in his classic book? After all, he knew Russian literature very well, and Russian literature from Lomonosov with his famous ode, when Elizaveta Petrovna “lay her elbow on the Caucasus,” is all oriental. It was impossible to ignore this. However, he carefully avoided this. Why?

A.E.: I have my own hypothesis. Said was writing during the Cold War, his book is from 1978, and it was politically incorrect for left-wing intellectuals to talk in the same terms about the Third World and the Second World. We don't feel it now, but it was important then. I also have a hypothesis, stated in that chapter of my book, which was translated and published in the journal Ab Imperio. And there I go into the intellectual history of Said himself and try to explain this truly mysterious lacuna.

Arseny Petrov: There is a feeling that in modern Russian nationalism there is a certain current that advocates the imperial project. And if you think about this phrase, it is actually quite strange and paradoxical. Could you comment on this somehow?

A.E.: For the empire, nationalism, relatively speaking, of the titular nation was always the main enemy, and especially in Russia. Everything would have gone well, but under Alexander III, nationalists began to come to power, so to speak, who literally took the project of Russification of foreign-language and non-Russian outskirts as a practical project. And everything began to crumble and collapsed. The nationalists under the emperor played a disastrous role - this is undoubtedly true. On the other hand, everyone knows that nationalism is very often expressed in imperial language, in the language of suppressing the outskirts in the name of empire, which is imagined rather as a very large and ever expanding national state. And for those people who are going to make politics with these kinds of ideas, I highly recommend studying history.

Ilya Lazarenko, National Democratic Alliance: What could decolonization mean for those regions that were colonized quite recently, that is, Siberia, the Far East?

A.E.: This is a very difficult question for me. Because, on the one hand, we can say that the national liberation movements in the history of the Russian Empire were attempts at decolonization, successful or unsuccessful attempts. For example, the Pugachev uprising, the revolution of 1905, the revolution of 1917 - these were attempts at decolonization. On the other hand, I, for example, have no doubt about the colonial nature of collectivization or the Gulag. I just gave lectures in Krasnoyarsk, at the Siberian Federal University, people perceived them very calmly and interestedly. Siberia is a huge Russian land, but at the level of memory it is not entirely Russian, at the level of history it is not at all Russian. I actually thought when I was giving the lecture: how interesting it would be to hold a conference on the topic “Siberia and the Caucasus,” two huge Russian colonies, polar different in many of their features. One is peaceful - the other is not peaceful, one is profitable - the other has always been unprofitable, one is Russified - the other is not.

Alexander Khramov: I will intervene as a presenter and expand on the issue of decolonization. If we say that colonization in Russia was centripetal in nature, then the slogans of decolonization should be applied not to the outskirts, to Siberia, to the Far East, to the Caucasus, but specifically to the internal provinces, which were subject to management by colonial methods. I’ll just read a quote from Mikhail Menshikov, a famous nationalist and publicist, he wrote in 1909: “The British, having conquered India, fed on it, and we, having conquered our outskirts, gave ourselves up to them to be devoured. We have placed Russia in the role of a vast colony for conquered peoples and are surprised that Russia is dying. Isn’t the same thing happening with India, didn’t the red and black and olive races perish, unable to drive the white predators from their bodies?” If such views were expressed 100 years ago, do they, in your opinion, have any prospects today? Is it possible in Russia, say, for a nationalist movement under anti-colonial slogans?

A.E.: At the beginning of the 20th century, the context of the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War was very important. But for me, for example, Siberian regionalism, in which the same Shchapov took an active part, or Yadrintsev, the author of the famous book “Siberia as a Colony,” is more interesting. So-called regionalism was often separatism. Even earlier, Bakunin had ideas of separatism, and there is nothing rare in the ideas of regional liberation. Another thing is that in some regions there were these movements, but in other regions, for example Tambov, they were not.

Listener: How does the process of internal colonization in Russia differ from similar processes in other countries, for example, from internal colonization in the USA?

A.E.: Great question. In the USA, the theory of Turner is known, who described the history of the movement of American civilization to the west as the movement of a certain line on a map, the frontier. The line moved, and Turner described in detail what was happening there, what people, what social groups were involved. There were regular monolithic movements and homogeneous processes at different stages. In Russia, it seems to me, this is not the case, although there are historians who are trying to extend this theory to the outlying territories of Russia, to Siberia or Central Asia. This works better in Central Asia. But in Russia there was no single line, no homogeneity, there were huge and not at all continuous breaks, pockets, voids. Sometimes the Cossacks took it upon themselves to develop them, and then the ministries did not know what to do with it. So this is a different topology - not a frontier, but rather an emptiness inside. These are other processes - uncoordinated, disordered, not knowing the division into internal and external.

Igor Monashov, Higher School of Economics: To what extent is your concept applicable to the analysis of the Soviet experience? Do you think industrialization of the 1930s is some kind of specialization of colonization or is it something else?

A.E.: I have no doubt that the Soviet period is completely different from the imperial period, and the post-Soviet period is completely different from the Soviet period. But certain points are similar. Let's say collectivization, and they wrote about it, was a radical project of internal colonization. At the same time, I am sure that there is no inertia in historical processes, that people every time reinvent how to govern the state. But the processes of historical creativity occur within the framework of the opportunities provided by geography, ecology, history, and economics, and therefore they are sustainable. Here we can mention the dependence on raw materials, which is reproduced in Russia under different conditions.

Sergey Sergeev, “Questions of Nationalism” magazine: Please tell me, do you agree with Ronald Suni that in the Russian Empire there was no metropolis as a certain territory, but that the metropolis was the social stratum itself, that is, the Russian socio-political elite?

A.E.: Yes, I agree with him. In the Russian Empire, you need to look more at power relations, and in my language this is internal colonization. But I would add that, after all, in Russia there were capitals, there were certain regions, provinces, territories in which this very layer, let’s call it the elite, was concentrated, from there it managed at a distance its estates throughout Russia, from there governors were appointed. So this layer cannot be completely suspended in the air, without geography.

Clothing and jewelry

The climatic conditions of most European countries required dressing warmer than the Romans did. In contrast to the ancient glorification of the beauty of the human body, the church considered the body sinful and insisted that it must be covered with clothing.

For a long time, women's and men's clothing were similar: a long, knee-length shirt, short pants, an overshirt, a raincoat. In the 12th century. it began to differ more and more, the first signs of fashion appeared. Changes in clothing styles reflected the public preferences of the time. Men began wearing thick stockings in the 14th century. turned into pants, women wore skirts exclusively. However, it was mainly representatives of the wealthy strata who had the opportunity to follow fashion. The Church did not approve of the nobility's passion for fashion.

As for clothing, the peasant usually wore a linen shirt - a kameez and trousers that reached his knees or even his ankles. On top of the kameez they wore another long shirt with wide and long sleeves (blouse). The outer garment was a cloak, fastened at the shoulders with a clasp (fibula). In winter, they wore either a roughly combed sheepskin coat or a warm cape made of thick fabric or fur.

Clothing reflected a person's place in society. The attire of the wealthy was dominated by bright colors, cotton and silk fabrics. The poor were content with dark clothing made of coarse homespun linen. Shoes for men and women were leather pointed shoes without hard soles. Most poor people walked along rural roads or muddy city streets in wooden shoes or barefoot. Headdresses originated in the 13th century. and have changed continuously since then. Familiar gloves acquired important importance during the Middle Ages. Shaking hands in them was considered an insult, and throwing a glove to someone was a sign of contempt and a challenge to a duel.

The nobility loved to add various decorations to their clothes. Men and women wore rings, bracelets, belts, and chains. Very often these things were unique jewelry. For the poor, all this was unattainable. And not only because of the cost, but also because it was prohibited by law. Wealthy women spent significant amounts of money on cosmetics and perfumes, brought by merchants from eastern countries. They were envied by representatives of the fair half of humanity, who could not afford such luxury, but tried to keep up with fashionistas.

At the end of the 11th century. The population of medieval Europe for the first time began to feel that they were cramped on their continent. Knights wandered along the paths, wondering where to find their possessions, which war to take part in and conquer lands. The peasants also began to lack enough land to feed themselves and pay tribute to their feudal lord. All this forced the Europeans to start colonization- Development of new lands. The period of active European colonization was the entire period of the 11th - 13th centuries.

In the Middle Ages they distinguished military (external) and internal colonization. Military colonization was aimed at capturing new lands by force of arms beyond the spread of Western Christian civilization. The military colonization of Europeans was aimed at the Iberian Peninsula, where the fight against the Arabs was carried out, and was called reconquista(conquest), to Palestine, where the Crusades under the pretext of the transfer of the Holy Sepulcher to the Baltic States, where, under the banner of the fight against pagans, the local population was actually destroyed, etc.

Internal colonization- this is the development by peasants of an array of free land in Europe. By that time there were enough free territories in Europe. It was only necessary to put in a lot of work so that they would produce crops and feed people. Peasants developed new lands with great difficulty, but the threat of crop failure and famine pushed them to do so. They cut down forests, drained swamps and turned them into fertile fields. That process was very difficult, grueling and long. Only within a few generations could a peasant family change an area unsuitable for agriculture into a fertile field. As a rule, the developed lands were a continuation of already existing fields.

The lords supported the efforts of the peasants; they understood: the development of new lands would lead to population growth, because then more people would be able to feed themselves; perhaps even new villages will arise whose residents will pay taxes to them, and they will become even richer. Therefore, the feudal lords encouraged peasants to cultivate virgin lands, exempting them from paying taxes for a certain period of time.

The need for land even pushed the peasants to attack the sea. Thus, the inhabitants of the Netherlands built dams and gradually conquered pieces of land from the sea, turning them into pastures. The competition between man and the water element has continued for centuries. Sometimes during storms the sea flooded the drained lands, but people restored the dams, and again, instead of sea waves, green hay appeared.

To carry out such a grandiose attack on nature, new tools and all kinds of technical inventions were required. Most of the new tools or farming methods were invented not at the time when Europeans expanded their living space (XI-XIII centuries), but much earlier. However, it was at this time that they began to be used en masse and played a decisive role. Heavy axes began to be used to cut down forests near the cleavers. To plow new lands, a heavy wheeled plow began to be used, into which, thanks to clamps and harnesses, a horse began to be harnessed. The collar transferred the burden of work for the horse from the neck to the chest, which did not contribute to rapid fatigue. And iron horseshoes for horses began to protect against injury. Heavy iron harrows began to be used to loosen the soil. Thanks to plows and harrows, it was possible to develop heavier but fertile soils. Windmills, borrowed from the East, became an important element of the rural landscape.

Along with technical innovations, new land cultivation technologies have also become established. In most parts of Europe, a three-field system has been established. The land that the peasant had at his disposal was divided into three parts. The first part of the fall was sown with winter crops. The second is spring. The third one was resting, i.e. was fallow. The following year, the first field was left fallow, the second was sown with winter crops, and the third with spring crops. In addition, crop rotation was carried out. The same crop was not sown in the same field for several years in a row. They began to use organic fertilizers. These changes in technology and technology have made it possible to slightly increase yields.

Country that is being colonized

Russian romantics and then Soviet poets sang the warmth and beauty of Russia. Historians, on the contrary, have been prone to worry about the Russian climate, natural and social. “In families we have the appearance of strangers; in the cities we look like nomads... We are, as it were, strangers to ourselves,” wrote Chaadaev, opening Russian intellectual history (see Chapter 3). For Russians, nature was not a mother, but a stepmother, wrote Sergei Solovyov (1988:7/8–9). During the turmoil of the 17th century, according to Vasily Klyuchevsky, “Moscow people seemed to feel like strangers in their own state, random, temporary inhabitants in someone else’s house” (1956: 3/52). Surprisingly, Klyuchevsky applies the same oxymoron to Peter I, a man of the 18th century: “Peter was a guest at home” (1956: 4/31). It is even more interesting that this trope emerges again when Klyuchevsky describes a typical nobleman of the early 19th century: “...with Voltaire’s book in his hands somewhere... in a Tula village,” this nobleman was “a stranger among his own” (1956: 5/183). Finally, in an essay about Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” Klyuchevsky speaks in the same words about the literary character: “He was a stranger to the society in which he had to move” (1990: 9/87). Colonization always involves an attempt master someone else's, and its failures and breakdowns led to the proliferation of objectifying discourses about his. If the feeling of being unable to become friends among strangers often accompanied the failures of external colonization, the feeling of strangers among their own turned out to be a constant form of discontent and protest associated with the situation of internal colonization. This trope is to be a stranger among your own; homesickness while staying at home is popular both among figures of the African-American movement and among postcolonial authors. “Why has God made me a stranger and an outcast in my own home?” asked African-American intellectual W.E.B. in 1903. Duboys. “Alienation from home is a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition,” argues Homi Baba; for him, the main problematic of colonial consciousness is not in the relationship of Self and Other, but in the Strangeness of Self, Otherness of the Self (Bhabha 1994: 13, 62; see also: Kristeva 1991). In this chapter we will see how in the 19th century the pioneers of Russian historiography searched for and found similar terms to talk about Russia's imperial experience.

Soloviev and the frontier

Having visited Russia in 1843, August von Haxthausen wrote that what was happening in Russia was not colonial expansion, but rather “internal colonization,” which had become “the most important subject of the entire internal politics and economy of this empire” (Maxthausenl856:2/76). Unlike other discoveries made by Prussian officials in Russia (see Chapters 7 and 10), this one went largely unnoticed. However, Haxthausen probably based his judgments on discussions with Russian colleagues, who willingly used the idea of ​​colonization in the hope of regulating the migration of Russian peasants to the periphery of the empire, primarily to the south of Russia and Siberia, and subsequently to Central Asia. In 1861, one of these debates about colonization, understood as the organized resettlement of human masses, took place in the Russian Geographical Society. Journalist and writer Nikolai Leskov, who himself managed internal migrations in his youth (see Chapter 11), was responding to a speech by geographer Mikhail Venyukov, who crossed Asia many times in his expeditions and later led agrarian reform in Russian Poland. Leskov argued that in fact many of the migrations were directed not to the distant possessions of the empire, but to its “middle places,” and this, Leskov said, was the main difference between the British and Russian methods of colonization (1988:60).

The mid- to late-19th century was a period of massive expansion for European empires (Arendt 1970). The Russian Empire, which participated in both the division of America and the Great Game in Asia, had to learn to talk about what was happening in its vast internal spaces. Historians who had mastered the language of world empires needed to adapt the foreign idea of ​​colonization to the vastness of provincial Russia. A conceptual breakthrough in this matter was made by the Moscow historian Sergei Solovyov. Tracing his genealogy as a historian directly from Schlözer and coordinating his actions with the Minister of Education Uvarov, he entered into a furious polemic with Khomyakov and the Slavophiles, whom he called an “anti-historical trend.” Applying the discourse of colonization to pre-Petrine Russia, Solovyov denied the very difference between the colonizers and the colonized: “It was a vast, virgin country, awaiting population, awaiting history: hence ancient Russian history is the history of a country that is being colonized” (1988: 2/631).

Soloviev formulated this striking phrase in his review of ancient Russian history. If there is no point in distinguishing between the subject and the object of Russian colonization, why do it? Soloviev vividly described the concerns of a country that is being colonized:

Populate as quickly as possible, call people from everywhere to empty places, lure with all kinds of benefits; go to new, better places, to the most favorable conditions, to a more peaceful, calm region; on the other hand, to retain the population, to return it, to force others not to accept it - these are the important issues of the colonizing country (1988: 2/631).

For the colonial consciousness there is no greater distance than between the colony and the metropolis. How can a country colonize itself? Soloviev understood this problem and specifically emphasized it:

But the country we are considering was not a colony, distant by oceans from the metropolis: it itself was the center of state life; state needs increased, state functions became more and more complicated, and yet the country did not lose the character of a colonizing country (1988: 2/631).

For the Russian language, this reflexive form of the verb, “to colonize,” is unusual, as for other European languages. In Russian it sounds impersonal, but strong and paradoxical. Despite this linguistic fact or thanks to it, Soloviev and his students constantly used precisely this formula, “colonized.” In his multi-volume history, Solovyov explained that the colonization of Russia successively proceeded from the southwest to the northeast, from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Dnieper and beyond. In the north, ancient Russian tribes advanced to Novgorod and the White Sea, in the east they captured the Upper Volga and lands around Moscow. There they founded the Russian state, but colonization continued further east and further into Siberia. It is important that Solovyov did not apply the idea of ​​a “country that is being colonized” to the new history of Russia. In the last volumes of his History, devoted to “new” rather than “ancient” Russian history, the term “colonization” does not appear.

Mark Bassin (1993) compared Solovyov's idea of ​​a "colonizing country" with Frederick J. Turner's concept of the American frontier. The similarities and differences of these ideas are significant for Russian and American historiography. Like the American frontier, the outer limit of Russian colonization was unclear, vague, and constantly shifting. As in America, this frontier was key to imperial culture. On both frontiers, persecuted religious minorities played a special role (Turner 1920; Etkind 1998; Breyfogle 2005). But there are significant differences between the concepts of Turner and Solovyov.

Turner examined contemporary events in the frontier region, while Soloviev limited the self-colonization of Russia to the most ancient period of its history, the Middle Ages. This is not as serious a difference as it might seem: there is nothing in this concept of colonization that prevents it from being applied to the modern history of Russia. As we will soon see, if Soloviev did not dare to take such a step, then Klyuchevsky did. Turner's attention, however, was focused on his own culture of the western frontier, and he examined in detail the mechanisms of its influence on the culture of the eastern states. Soloviev did not leave such a description of the external, moving border of Russian colonization, but other historians have studied in detail its individual parts. The pioneers of the border lands - hunter, trader and sectarian - were about the same, although in Russia you need to add the Cossack here; but the second and third lines of colonization are very different. In America, according to Turner, the lands adjacent to the frontier were successively managed, according to the “four stages” principle, by hunters, cattle breeders, farmers and industrialists. Then the frontier moved further to the west, and the line of these four stages was transferred there too. In Russia it was different. Over the centuries, the frontier of colonization continued to move eastward, leaving behind vast areas as virgin as ever. Subsequently, these spaces had to be colonized again and again. The American frontier and Russian colonization have different topologies: the first is continuous, like the front lines and trenches of Turner’s contemporary wars; the second left tears, pockets and folds. Perhaps the Russian experience is closer to another thesis about American expansion - Walter Webb's idea of ​​a "Great American Desert" between the east and west coasts of North America, which remained undeveloped long after the frontier line crossed it all. As Webb showed, the cultivation of the prairies required different skills and tools than the settlement of forests, which were more familiar to Europeans. Therefore, the colonization of America did not resemble a smooth movement of a line from east to west, but jumps, returns, violent movements at the edges and long pauses in the middle (Webb 1931).

From Finland to Manchuria, the lands of Northern Eurasia, conquered by the Russian sovereign, were difficult to map; it was even more difficult to study the peoples who inhabited them (Widdis 2004, Tolz 2005). For military and trade reasons, the lands and peoples on the borders where expansion was stopped by an equal enemy always turned out to be more famous than the lands inside the country. Although many zones arose along different parts of Russia's vast external colonization frontier where colonizers collaborated, competed, and hybridized with the colonized, these mixed cultures were local, highly diverse, and widely separated in time and space. To create a unified ethnosociological description of all these cultures within the framework of one work, as Turner did with the American frontier, seems impossible; no one set themselves such a task. With the help of gunpowder, alcohol and bacteria, the Russians destroyed, displaced or assimilated many peoples - neighbors, competitors, allies, enemies. But this process lasted for centuries. Waves of adventure and violence, toil and mass interbreeding rolled from the center of Russia to the moving frontiers of colonization; Colonial goods and knowledge were returned from there. Culturally, the Russian frontier was rather scarce, but geographically it was very extensive. No matter how time changed it, it always stretched over vast spaces. Within its borders, regular transitions from hunting to pastoralism and from agriculture to industrial development were the exception rather than the rule. Often the only profitable business for many centuries was hunting; sometimes cities immediately grew on land that had not seen a plow.

Developing centrifugally, the turbulent life on the moving frontiers of colonization contributed to the development of the economic centers of Russia, from Novgorod to Moscow and St. Petersburg. But even Russian capitals were founded on territories foreign to their founders. Novgorod and Kyiv were as foreign to the Varangians who ruled there as St. Petersburg was to the Muscovites who founded it. From the borders to the capitals, the space of internal colonization extended throughout Russia.

Shchapov and “zoological economy”

A significant influence on the idea of ​​Russian colonization was exerted by the historian Afanasy Shchapov, whose main works were written not while he was a university professor, but while he was a government official and political exile. He was the first to present colonization not as a stormy and victorious adventure, but as a bloody, truly political process. There were victims and victors, and the task of the historian was to discern both. Being a professor of history at the Imperial Kazan University in the late 1850s, Shchapov sorted through the archives of the Solovetsky Monastery, transported to Kazan during the preparation for the Crimean War. In the same northern archive, which survived in Kazan, the leading historian of the next generation, Vasily Klyuchevsky, collected material for his first monograph on the “monastic colonization” of the Russian North. The first review he wrote was on the work of Shchapov, of whom Klyuchevsky had “the highest opinion” (Nechkina 1974: 434).

By that time, Shchapov was no longer in Kazan. In 1861, he was arrested for inciting a riot, but then pardoned by the tsar and, moreover, appointed to an official position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Shchapov was later exiled to Siberia, where he continued to write revisionist articles, publishing them in metropolitan magazines. Agreeing with Solovyov that Russian history was a history of colonization, Shchapov described this process as “the centuries-old tension of the physical forces of the people... in the thousand-year spread of colonization and agriculture among forests and swamps, in the fight against Finnish and Turko-Mongol tribes...” (1906: 2/182) . Born near Irkutsk, the son of a Russian deacon and a Buryat woman (in Siberia such people were called “creoles”), Shchapov emphasized the role of race mixing more than other Russian historians. He was helped by the general fascination with colonial ethnography in the mid-19th century, which Shchapov adopted, in a characteristically speculative manner, from French authors. But Shchapov is quite original as a pioneer of environmental history. He described in detail two directions of Russian colonization: the fur colonization, during which hunters gradually depleted the populations of fur-bearing animals, moving further into the depths of Siberia and Alaska, and the fish colonization, which supplied Central Russia with freshwater and sea fish and caviar.

Creating his concept of “zoological economy,” Shchapov considered furs to be the key to Russian colonization (1906: 2/280–293, 309–337). From Rurik to Ivan the Terrible, the wealth of Russia was measured in furs. Beavers lured the Slavs up the Finnish rivers, the gray squirrel provided the wealth of Novgorod, the sable called the Muscovites to endless Siberia, the sea otter brought them to Alaska and California (see Chapter 5). Colonization for Shchapov did not carry a negative meaning; this beloved term appears on almost every page of his verbose and passionate texts. The industrialists were followed, often against their will, by exiles, Cossacks, and peasants. “Agricultural colonization,” wrote Shchapov, followed the “fur trade” and gradually replaced it. Ecologically, colonization meant deforestation. By cutting down forests for their subsidiary plots, industrialists did not know that they were destroying exactly what interested them in distant and cold lands - fur-bearing animals. The driving force of Russian colonization, according to Shchapov, was not the sword and gun, but the ax and the plow that followed it. But they were all preceded by a bow and a trap. Shchapov understood Russian colonization as a series of parallel histories - the migration of people, the destruction of animals, the cultivation of plants and the multifaceted process of discovery, settlement, cultivation and depletion of land. No one had created such a concept, multidimensional, ecological and humane, before Shchapov.

Klyuchevsky and modernity

Decades later, Vasily Klyuchevsky repeated the motto of his teacher Solovyov, revising it in one important respect: “The history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized... Sometimes falling, sometimes rising, this age-old movement continues to the present day” (1956: 1/31). If for Solovyov the colonization of Russia began in antiquity and ended in the Middle Ages, then for Klyuchevsky it continued further, capturing modernity. Reworking his work in 1907, he added a long fragment about resettlement in Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East. Using the new railways, these mass migrations were organized by the empire at the beginning of the 20th century. Klyuchevsky considered them the newest form of the same “century-old movement” of Russian colonization. Klyuchevsky did not make any other significant changes to the new edition of the Course of Russian History: resettlement turned out to be the only fact of our time worthy of mention in a history textbook. Thus, Klyuchevsky applied the idea of ​​colonization to the entire long period of Russian history, from its first steps to the beginning of the 20th century. As the most influential Russian historian, Klyuchevsky argued that “the colonization of the country was the basic fact of our history” and that the familiar periods of Russian history were in fact “the main moments of colonization” (1956: 1/31–32). Repeating and modifying Solovyov’s formula about Russia as a country “that is being colonized,” Klyuchevsky sought to expand the concept of colonization, bring it to the present day and strengthen its critical character. This was Klyuchevsky’s personal achievement, although here one can also see the influence of Shchapov or their common teacher, Eshevsky.

Speaking about the ancient Slavs, Solovyov gave a definition of national character, which was then often applied to Russians:

Such divergence, vagueness, and the habit of leaving at the first inconvenience resulted in semi-settlement, a lack of attachment to one place, which weakened moral concentration, taught one to seek easy work, to be reckless, to live a kind of intermittent life, to live day after day (1988: 2/ 631; see also: Bassin 1993: 500; Sunderland 2004: 171).

Referring to this portrait, Klyuchevsky argued that these unflattering characteristics of the “Russian character” arose precisely as a consequence of colonization - the situation of “a guest in one’s own country,” and often an unwanted guest. This shows the critical potential of the idea of ​​Russian colonization, which its founding fathers recognized, although not fully developed. It is precisely as a “peculiar attitude of the population towards the country,” Klyuchevsky argued, that colonization acted “in our history for centuries” and operates “to this day.” In colonization, Klyuchevsky saw “the main condition” that caused “by its change... a change in the forms of community life” in Russian history.

Self-applicable judgments have a special logic. If X does Y to Z, as in the statement “Britain colonized India,” this implies that X and Z already existed before Y occurred. But such straightforward logic does not work in the case of Russian colonization because, as Soloviev and Klyuchevsky argued, during colonization Russia created itself. In their formula “Russia colonized itself,” X made Y with X. Before Y there was no X, and there is no Z that was originally different from X. They all arose simultaneously. As Klyuchevsky wrote, the “area of ​​colonization” in Russia “expanded along with its state territory.” Since the colonized areas did not retain a special status, but were absorbed by the state, in Russia there is no reason to distinguish between the colonies and the metropolis. As the state expanded, Russia colonized not only the newly developed territories, but also itself. Moreover, the central territories were repeatedly subjected to the process of colonization.

The history of Russia is not the history of a country that colonizes, and it is not the history of a country that is colonized. “The history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized.” The calm, academic repetition at the beginning of this formula in no way prepares for its paradoxical, deconstructive ending.

However, the formula remained stable and, moreover, became canon. In fact, the repetition at the beginning of the formula (“The history of Russia is the history of the country”) is not a tautology. Soloviev and Klyuchevsky warn the reader that in this case they are talking about Russia as a country, and not as a people, state or empire. In Russian, as in many other languages, the word “country” stands between the geographical “land” and the political “nation”. This is exactly the word that historians needed. They could not convey their point without rhetorical repetition, because an alternative definition (for example, “The history of Russia consisted of colonizing itself”) would suggest that Russia existed before this self-colonization. But their idea was to describe the cyclical, reflexive or recurrent process that created and continues to create Russia, which is carrying out this very process. Polished by repeated use, this formula couldn't look any different. That's why they repeated it like a meme.

School of Colonization

Klyuchevsky's followers distinguished between different methods of colonizing Russia: “free colonization”, which was carried out by private people - runaway serfs, deserter soldiers, persecuted sectarians; “military colonization”, which was the result of military campaigns, from the capture of Novgorod and Kazan to operations in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Amur; “monastic colonization,” centered around large Orthodox monasteries, which owned thousands of serfs, conducted trade and created trading posts; and “Cossack colonization,” which was carried out by a class created by the empire specifically for the tasks of external colonization and border service (but as the borders moved east, it turned into a caste incapable of internal colonization). Historians have told how Russia's routes to the east were paved by industrialists, blessed by monks, fortified by Cossacks, and cultivated by settlers. The goal of Klyuchevsky’s school was to create a systematic and balanced overview of these events, revealing Russia’s civilizational mission in the vastness of Eurasia. True to the cause of Russian nationalism, Klyuchevsky's disciples tended to underestimate the mass violence that such forms of colonization brought with them. Although it was local resistance and colonial violence that made necessary all those stockades, walls and towers of forts, kremlins and monasteries, the development of which was described in detail by Klyuchevsky's school, sensitivity to such violence and compassion for its victims came with a new generation of historians who lived through the Russian Revolution. Having become its participants, many of them were arrested or emigrated, but the most successful ones continued to write.

Klyuchevsky’s student, Pavel Milyukov, combined history and politics for decades. In his youth, he managed to take part in military operations in the Caucasus (1877), and after becoming a teacher at Moscow University, he was fired and convicted of political activities in the capital (1895). With the victory of the revolution in February 1917, he became the minister of the revolutionary government, and after the Bolshevik coup he took part in the Civil War. Then for many years he played the role of the political leader of the anti-Soviet emigration. In his multi-volume course on Russian history, Miliukov showed better than his predecessors the scale of violence that the process of colonization required. Combining the historical tradition he received from his predecessors, from Schlözer to Klyuchevsky, with the equally strong ethnographic tradition developed from Herder to Shchapov, Milyukov presented a detailed study of the peoples who were assimilated or destroyed by the Russians in the process of their colonization. Combining sources from state archives with notes from travelers and soldiers, as well as local legends, folklore, names of rivers and villages, he restored the names of disappeared peoples, put them on a geographical map and tried to return them to history. For Miliukov, this was both a duty to historical memory and a form of resistance to a regime that was creating new violence in Russia. The concept of colonization played a central role in Miliukov's work. An article he wrote for the Russian Encyclopedia just in the year of his arrest states: “The colonization of Russia by the Russian tribe was carried out throughout Russian history and constitutes one of its most characteristic features” (1895: 740).

Klyuchevsky’s student was also Mikhail Pokrovsky, who took on the difficult task of revising the legacy of imperial historiography, adapting it to the new conditions created by the Bolsheviks, to which he himself belonged. Among his other ideas, he valued the “heresy” that likened the development of Russian political economy to the “colonial system”, as Marx depicted it in the first volume of Capital. More of a critic and polemicist than a theorist or archival historian, Pokrovsky saw in any historical work a distorting mirror of ideology, subject to interpretation from a Marxist position. Having devoted many caustic pages to criticism of Russian liberal historians, Pokrovsky emphasized the influence of the persecuted Shchapov on them, considering Klyuchevsky himself a student of this “materialist”. The Romanov Empire, Pokrovsky wrote, always remained “a colonial power of the most primitive type,” and therefore required extensive development to the east; This is how he explained the wars on the eastern borders of the empire. Siberia, the Caucasus, Central Asia - “a huge eastern bubble that hung heavily on the Russian national economy” (a recent book about Siberia literally repeats this image). As long as the empire had the opportunity for extensive development, it could avoid social reforms and technical progress, therefore, it is “the colonialist activities of the Romanovs” that is the reason for Russian backwardness (Pokrovsky 1933: 248). Pokrovsky's ideas about the essential difference between the two types of capital, commercial and industrial, are long outdated, but many postcolonial historians born a century later would recognize their ideas in his denunciations of Russian colonization. More interested in the history of international relations than in social changes in Russia, Pokrovsky also wrote about the attempts of Western powers to colonize Russia through a system of bank credit. While dealing with processes of external colonization, he did not take advantage of the opportunities that a Marxist analysis of the internal colonization of imperial spaces could have given him; but Lenin directly pointed out these possibilities (see Chapter 1). Having entered into a passionate polemic with Trotsky and, it seems, winning the sympathy of young communist historians (see Chapter 4), Pokrovsky did not know that after his death he would be subjected to absurd but destructive criticism from Stalin. I have no doubt that the basis for the 1938 campaign in which the Pokrovsky school was declared to be a “base of spies, saboteurs and terrorists” was the very real differences between aggressive Stalinist imperialism and the liberating, decolonizing ideals of the early years of the revolution. Not a trace should have remained of them, precisely as ideals.

Having lived to see the beginning of decolonization and experienced the tragic experience of revolution, collectivization and terror, Klyuchevsky’s students understood the political meaning of their work in a new way. The most prominent of them, Matvey Lyubavsky, was the rector of the Imperial Moscow University until 1917. He remained in Russia and was arrested in 1930 in the so-called “case of historians,” so Lyubavsky wrote his last book, “Review of the History of Russian Colonization,” in political exile in Bashkiria. In it, he once again repeated the idea that “Russian history is essentially the history of a continuously colonizing country.” Instead of the reflexive form used by his predecessors, he used a simpler construction: “continuously colonizing” instead of “colonizing itself.” The change is small, but significant: it is fully consistent with Lyubavsky’s concept, which revealed the importance of external colonization in the formation of the Russian state (Lyubavsky 1986). Having brought his research to the end of the 19th century, Lyubavsky included in it a chapter on the colonization of the Baltic lands. He probably saw the irony of history in the fact that a book about colonization ended with a chapter about the territory on which the capital of the empire was built. There was also a sad irony in the fact that the leading Moscow historian created his main book in Bashkiria - one of those colonized regions about which he wrote. The book remained in manuscript, but survived and was published half a century later.

A younger scientist, Yevgeny Tarle, also arrested in the “historians’ case,” was soon released and became a major Soviet historian. He wrote his main work (Tarle 1965) on European colonialism, the highest manifestation of imperialism, which was inconsistently opposed by the Russian Empire and consistently by the Soviet Union. Sympathetic to the Third World of former colonies and critical of the First World of imperialism, this book by the Soviet historian left unfilled the same gigantic lacuna that Said's books, and then postcolonial studies, left unfilled - the Second World. The oceanic difference between Pokrovsky, Lyubavsky and Tarle - their works as much as their destinies - illustrates the range of interpretations of the central concept for them, colonization, and the common heritage of the Klyuchevsky school (Etkind 2002).

During the late imperial period, the school of colonization dominated Russian historiography. From lectures, her ideas and concepts moved into textbooks, and from there into encyclopedias. Russian historians have written detailed works about how Russia conquered Siberia, Crimea, Finland, Poland or Ukraine. However, they rarely called these territories Russian colonies, preferring to generally speak of Russia as “a country that is being colonized.” A notable exception in this regard is another political exile, Nikolai Yadrintsev, whose book Siberia as a Colony (2003, first published 1882) became a remarkable example of critical, anti-imperial history. The first mention in Ukrainian literature that Ukraine was a Russian colony dates back to 1911 (Velychenko 2012). But the works of Shchapov and Yadrintsev did not enter the mainstream of Russian historiography. Saying that Russia colonized itself, Soloviev and Klyuchevsky did not deny the conquest of Siberia, the Caucasus or Poland, but they did not protest against them either. In academic language, however, their formulas criticized the specific character of the Russian Empire: “As the territory expanded, along with the growth of the external power of the people, its internal freedom was increasingly constrained,” wrote Klyuchevsky (1956: 3/8). “The state was swelling, and the people were fading” (1956: 3/12), he wrote, generalizing this situation by the law of the inverse relationship between imperial space and internal freedom. All this was put into the short and repetitive formula of “a country that is being colonized.”

By connecting subject and object, the idea of ​​self-colonization gave Russian historians a complex and paradoxical, but useful language. The discourse of self-colonization constituted just one of the periods in Russian historiography, although it dominated for a long time and proved to be tenacious. Working during the era of colonial empires and dealing with a country that rivaled those empires, leading Russian historians found the language of colonization necessary and appropriate for their studies of Russia. However, they radically rethought the Western idea of ​​colonization. Firstly, the Solovyov-Klyuchevsky school understood colonization as an internal process and aimed at the subject himself, and not just as an external process aimed at a distant and alien object. Secondly, historians of this school ambivalently condemned and approved of the processes of colonization, which differs from the critical tradition of British and French historiography and especially from the ideologically driven postcolonial approach. In the 19th century, Russian historians did not necessarily attach a critical meaning to “colonial” terminology. Even the exiled Shchapov admired the heroism of those who colonized the vast country, but condemned the massacres they themselves carried out. When Miliukov, the boldest critic of Russian colonization, became foreign minister, he became a hawk for whom the goal of the First World War was to conquer Constantinople for Russia. And yet, in the century-long space of Russian historiography, from Pogodin and Solovyov to Miliukov and Lyubavsky, postcolonial dynamics are noticeable: imperial self-praise of colonization processes became less and less relevant, and appeal to the memory of colonized, assimilated or destroyed peoples, on the contrary, aroused more and more interest among historians .

With the defeat of Pokrovsky, Soviet historians abandoned the idea that the discourse of colonization was applicable to Russian history: it did not correspond to the class approach and the idea of ​​a union of socialist republics. In Russia at the end of the 19th century, colonization could be considered a progressive phenomenon, but in the Soviet Union it began to be perceived as a reactionary process, which, precisely because of this, has little in common with Russian history. Klyuchevsky’s biographer considered his concept of Russian colonization one of her teacher’s weakest ideas (Nechkina 1974: 427). But the colonization paradigm continued to live in the works of the almost forgotten school of political geography, headed by Veniamin Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky (1915; Polyan 2001). Soviet exploration of the Arctic continued under the name of colonization, to which some historians of Klyuchevsky’s school had a hand (Essays 1922; Holquist 2010a). Naturally, colonial terminology completely disappeared from official discourse in the early 1930s, when the Soviet government carried out the most massive colonization of Russia using the most brutal methods in its history - collectivization and the Gulag.

Historians of the school of colonization did not specialize in criticizing Russia's imperial aspirations. Their historiographical tradition was secular, liberal and nationalist. Like the Russian monarchs, these historians participated in a global process of “knowledge exchange between empires” (Stoler 2009: 39), connecting the Russian and other empires through relations of selective and sometimes mutual imitation. The notebooks of Klyuchevsky, a recognized leader of Russian historical science, amaze the reader with political despair, which is deeper hidden in his course of lectures: “In the Europe of the Tsars, Russia could have power, even decisive; in Europe of peoples, it is a thick log washed ashore by a stream” (Klyuchevsky 2001: 406). From the mid-19th to the beginning of the 20th century, historians of three generations, whose ideas and textbooks formed the basis of Russian historiography, agreed on little among themselves. But there was one formula that they repeated one after another in agreement: “Russia is a country that is being colonized.” Isaev Alexey Valerievich

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Cambridge University professor Alexander Etkind has been conducting historical and cultural studies of the processes of internal colonization for the last few years. Today, entire international scientific conferences and research collections are devoted to this phenomenon, and recently Alexander Etkind gave a series of lectures on internal colonization at several Russian universities. In short, internal colonization is the process of a state developing its own territory and its own people. A RR correspondent met with Alexander Etkind in one of the Moscow cafes and asked about the details of how and why the state is mastering itself and what this leads to.

Cambridge University Professor Alexander Etkind

Photo from the archives of the European University in St. Petersburg

– One of the first theses of your lecture given at the Higher School of Economics: when the state runs out of resources, the state takes care of its people. It turns out that internal colonization is a kind of anti-crisis measure, primarily of a material nature and consequences?

- Not certainly in that way. Internal colonization is always preceded by external colonization - the expansion of borders. There remains some space inside: empty or full, known or unknown. The more a country expands outward, the more black holes remain inside. Colonization is the filling of black holes and civilization, education, and exploitation of their inhabitants. In Russia, the expansion of borders, especially to the East, was in search of raw materials. In the Middle Ages, there was a search for fur in order to export it. Then the fur disappeared, but the space remained. Internal colonization began.

– Pessimists and futurists are frightened by the fact that there is only a couple of decades of oil left in the world. Let’s imagine that oil suddenly runs out—Russia’s main resource has disappeared. Will new internal colonization begin?

– Well, something will happen... Naturally, the state will need new sources of income. Some people who run the state indulge in fantasies that when oil runs out, they will be able to export something else, such as water. But if there is nothing to export, you will have to deal with people.

In my book, I look in detail at the historical analogy: the fur export that raised the Muscovite state, and what happened when the furs ran out. Then the troubled times began. Then, on more civilized principles, the Russian Empire arose. Something like this will happen even when oil runs out or is no longer in demand.

– Is the process of establishing a state and the development of territories by a power group synonymous with internal colonization?

- No. The process of colonization is determined by cultural distance. When cultural differences between government and people reach a critical mass, we can talk about colonization. When Americans conquer Indians or Russian troops conquer the mountaineers of the Caucasus, this is colonization based on cultural differences. Why did the troops go to the Caucasus? They believed that there were some valuable resources there, but they did not find any resources there. They hoped that sericulture would develop there, but it never did. They found oil, but it was almost gone.

– You called the alienation of the people from power one of the results of internal colonization. Why does this happen and do you see something similar in modern Russia?

– Alienation occurs because colonization combines social power with cultural distance, whereas in other situations, such as democratic or totalitarian societies, power is exercised without constructing cultural differences between the sovereign and the subjects.

– During the lecture, you said that Peter I, by shaving off the boyars’ beards, created a hierarchy of power on a basis similar to race, when the holders of power were apparently different from the people. In this case, on what principle is the modern hierarchy of power structured?

– Many societies in the colonies were built on the principle of dominance of the superior race, which rules in its own favor, and the inferior race works - cultivates cane and so on. There are visible differences between them - for example, skin color. But centuries passed, a democracy arose in which everyone has rights, but some became rich, others poor. And, unfortunately, the level of income very often correlates with racial differences, as well as the level of education, life expectancy, and so on... But nevertheless, in a democratic society everyone participates in elections: there is economic superiority, but there is also political equality, therefore with the poor people have to be considered. In many situations, they vote much more consistently than whites and rich people. This is the mechanism of balance, counterweight. And in Russia we still see a monstrous socio-economic stratification - much stronger than in countries with intense social inequalities, in England or the USA. It's all very ugly here and there. But a counter-modern economy based on the exploitation of raw materials leads to the formation of a class society. Russian sociologists are also talking about this now. The only difference between the class society of the Russian Empire is that there these classes were prescribed in the law that was taught in school. And in modern Russia, class society is unconstitutional and illegal. There are many characteristics of a class society, for example, different punishments for people of different classes for the same crimes, or different access to education and civil service, or the transfer of status by inheritance. Social inequalities are inherited everywhere, but, say, in England, when a person dies, half of his property goes to taxes. This is an equalization mechanism: the state redistributes this money, and the heir receives only half, and if he does not multiply what he received through his labor or luck, the family will certainly become poorer. This is not the case in Russia. There are strong and rich people, and they want their children to be strong and rich too. Nobody opposes this, although the source of their strength and wealth is usually not productive labor, but the vagaries of the commodity economy.

– What do you see today as a reflection of Russia’s intra-colonial past?

– I don’t believe in historical inertia, I believe in the memory of a place. In the Kremlin, for example, there is a memory that affects the rulers. Peter I fled from Moscow to change the country, then the Bolsheviks fled from St. Petersburg for the same purpose. In Russia, starting from the Middle Ages, a habit arose that the holders of power are perceived as people of a different nature, living a different life than others. Certain institutions that lasted for a very long time, like the Romanov Empire or the Communist Party of the USSR, drove the country into a dead end, and power changed catastrophically. Political democracy, which equalizes the voters and the elected, has not emerged. Some authoritarian institutions were replaced by others for a long time.

– In modern political discourse, there are often calls for decolonization: “Stop feeding the Caucasus,” etc. What do you think is the reason for this trend?

– The current imperial regime of power is tired not only of those whom it suppresses in the colonies. People in the Caucasus say “get out of here,” as they once did in India. But people in Moscow also say “stop feeding the Caucasus.” This was also very common in Great Britain when it came to India, which had long ceased to pay for itself, and resources that were needed by the metropolis itself were spent on it. These two different processes may or may not be coordinated in any way. One is more like decolonization, the other is more like an anti-imperial protest of the metropolis against its own empire.

– Foreign researchers are primarily interested in the internal colonization of Russia—the domestic participants in your collection on internal colonization are in the minority. Don't you think this is paradoxical?

– Our collection “There, Inside” has a thousand pages, and articles were written by scientists from different countries - from America to Japan, including authors from Russia and Ukraine. One editor is a Muscovite, the other is a German from Bavaria, I work in England. Unfortunately, Slavic and Russian studies are now more developed abroad - in America, England, Germany. I know that there is a huge competition for the department of Slavic studies at St. Petersburg State University or Moscow State University: this means that people want to study there. But the state is cutting budget places.