To Colonize Oneself
The Romantic and then the Soviet poets sang of the warmth and beauty of the Russian land. But historians of Russia expressed deep insecurity about the Russian environment, both natural and social. Russian nature was not the mother for Russians, but the stepmother, said Sergei Soloviev (1988: 7/8-9). During the crisis of the seventeenth century, Muscovites felt alien in their own state, "as if they were accidental and temporary dwellers in someone else's house," wrote Vasilii Kliuchevsky (1956: 3/52). Surprisingly, this historian also applied the same oxymoronic trope, homesickness at home, to a man of the eighteenth century, Peter I: he was "a guest in his own home" (1956: 4/31). Strikingly, the same author also applied the same trope to a typical early-nineteenth-century noble who, "strolling with Voltaire's book somewhere in his own village," felt himself "an alien among his own kind" (1956: 5/183). In his wonderful essay on Pushkin's Onegin, Kliuchevsky applied the same characteristic to its fictional character: "[Onegin] was foreign to the society in which he moved" (1990: 9/87). An important trope of the High Imperial Period, this persistent image was sometimes based on historical evidence and sometimes not; what is clear is that the historians preferred to see their favorite protagonists in this light.
"Why did God make me a stranger and an outcast in mine own house?" wrote the renowned African American intellectual, W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 (Washington et al. 1965: 214). Postcolonial theorists have also speculated about this experience of being "strangers to ourselves" (Kristeva 1991). "The 'unhomely' is a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition," states Bhabha (1994: 13). In the nineteenth century, the pioneers of Russian historiography found their own formulas for the same intuition.
Soloviev and the Frontier
Having visited Russia in 1843, August von Haxthausen wrote that this country was involved not in a colonial expansion but, rather, in an "internal colonization," which was "the most important subject of the whole internal politics and economy of this Empire" (1856: 2/76). Unlike the other Russian discoveries of this Prussian official, this one failed to attract public attention. However, mid-nineteenth- century agricultural experts eagerly used the concept of colonization (kolonizatsiia) when they discussed and regulated migrations of Russian peasants to the peripheral regions of the Empire, mainly to southern Russia, Siberia and, later, Central Asia. One of many such debates took place in 1861 at the Russian Geographical Society. The journalist Nikolai Leskov, who managed some of these internal resettlements (see Chapter 11), responded to the speech of the geographer Mikhail Veniukov, who had traversed Asia and a little later presided over the agricultural reform in eastern Poland. Leskov stated that, in practice, many organized migrations were directed toward "the central areas of our Empire" rather than its distant possessions, and this was a major difference between Russian and British modes of colonization (Leskov 1988: 60).
The mid- and late nineteenth century was the moment of imperial expansion on a large scale (Arendt 1970). Taking its part in the conquest of America, the Great Game in Asia, and even the scramble for Africa, the Russian Empire was no less concerned about its vast hinterland. Having appropriated imperialist language, it needed to adjust the overseas concept of colonization to its terrestrial, provincial realms. The Moscow historian, Sergei Soloviev, made the conceptual breakthrough. Drawing his academic genealogy directly from Schlozer, he was engaged in a fierce polemics with Khomiakov and his Slavophile followers, whom he deemed "an anti-historical school" (see Chapter 1). He appropriated Khomiakov's critical notion of Russia as a colony, but gave it an interpretation that was deeper both historically and logically. Applying the discourse of colonization to pre-Petrine Russia, Soloviev rejected the very difference between the colonizers and the colonized: "Russia was a vast, virgin country, which was waiting to be populated, waiting for its history to begin: therefore ancient Russian history is the history of a country that colonizes itself" (1988: 2/631).
Soloviev formulated this astonishing dictum in his survey of Russia's ancient history. If there is no point in differentiating between the subject and the object of Russia's colonization, then let us avoid doing so. Soloviev gave a dynamic depiction of the concerns of a self-colonized country:
To populate as soon as possible, to call people from everywhere to come to empty places, to tempt them with various benefits; to leave a place for newer, better lands, for the most profitable conditions, for an edge that is quiet and peaceful; on the other hand, to cling to the people, to bring them back, to force others not to accept them - these are the important concerns of a country that colonizes itself. (1988: 2/631)
For a colonial mind, there is no greater distance in the world than that between the metropolitan land and its colony. How can a country colonize itself? Soloviev knew the problem and emphasized it:
This country [Russia] was not a colony that was separated from the metropolitan land by oceans: the heart of the state's life was situated in this very country. . . . While the needs and functions of the state were increasing, the country did not lose her self-colonizing character. (1988: 2/631)
In Russian, the reflexive form that Soloviev used, "to colonize itself," is as unusual as it is in English. In the original even more than in the translation, this formula sounds dynamic, even forceful, and paradoxical. But Soloviev and his disciples were consistent in the use of this verbal form. Going into detail in his multiple volumes, Soloviev explained that the direction of Russia's self-colonization was coherent, from the south-west to the north-east, from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Dnieper. Going north, the ancient Russian tribes went to Novgorod and to the coast of the White Sea. Going east, they colonized the upper Volga and the neighborhood of Moscow. There they established the Russian state, but the direction of colonization remained the same, to the east and all the way to Siberia. Importantly, Soloviev did not apply the idea of "Russia colonizing itself" to the history that he perceived as modern. In his later volumes that described the "new" Russian history as opposed to the "ancient," he did not use the term "colonization."
In a pioneering essay, Mark Bassin (1993) compared Soloviev's idea of Russia's "colonization of itself" with Frederick J. Turner's concept of the American "frontier." There are many resemblances and differences between these two concepts, both of them crucial to the histories of Russia and America. Like the American frontier, the external line of Russia's colonization was uncertain, diffuse, and constantly moving. As in America, this line was centrally important for the development of Russian imperial culture. Persecuted religious minorities were equally important in the American and Russian frontiers (Turner 1920; Etkind 1998; Breyfogle 2005). However, there are also significant differences between Turner's and Soloviev's concepts.