Because of [the Russians'] high mobility, their shapelessness, their habit of leaving after the first difficulty, they developed a semi-settledness, a lack of commitment to a place, a weakened moral focus, and lack of calculation; Russians developed the habit of looking for easy work, of living in limbo, from one day to another. (Soloviev 1988: 2/631; see also Bassin 1993: 500; Sunderland 2004: 171)
Kliuchevsky argued that this set of characteristics was a consequence of self-colonization. He generalized that this "particular relation of the people to the country," the relation of colonization, "worked in Russia over centuries and is working now." In this, Kliuchevsky saw "the main condition" that defined the development of "changing forms of community" in Russian history. Repeating and varying Soloviev's formula, that Russia is "a country that colonizes itself," Kliuchevsky wished to emphasize and extend this process even more than his teacher. Thus, this most influential of Russian historians stated that "the colonization of the country is the single most important fact of Russia's history" and that, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, the standard periods of Russian history are nothing more than "the major moments of colonization" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/31-2).
Self-applicable judgments have an unusual logic. If X does Y to Z, as in the statement "Britain colonizes India," that implies that X and Z were there before Y occurred. But this straightforward logic wouldn't work for the colonization of Russia because, according to Soloviev and Kliuchevsky, Russia has constituted itself through the process of colonization. There was no X that preceded Y and no Z that was different from X. It all has evolved together. Therefore, in "Russia colonizes itself," X does Y to X. As Kliuchevsky said, the area of colonization expanded along with the territory of the state. Since the colonized areas did not retain their special status but were absorbed by the Russian state, there is no reason to distinguish between Russia's colonies and its metropolitan center. With the territorial growth of the state, Russia colonized the newly appropriated territories, but it also (though probably in different forms) colonized itself at its imperial core, which has recurrently undergone this process of colonization.
"The history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself." There is an awkward repetition in this formula but there is also a feeling that it could not be worded differently. Structurally, the formula combined the most trivial, even banal repetition in the first half and the paradoxical, deconstructive second half. By saying, "The history of Russia is the history of a country," Soloviev and Kliuchevsky alerted the reader to the fact that, this time, they were talking about Russia as the country and not as the people, the state, or the empire. In Russian, as in English, "country" stands somewhere between the geographical "land" and the political "nation," which is exactly what is needed. They could not say what they wanted to say without this rhetorical repetition, because an alternative formula such as "The history of Russia consisted of self-colonization" would assume that Russia existed before this self-colonization, while the very idea was to describe the process in which Russia was created by a process that it also performed. Polished by so many hands, the formula could not be rendered in any other way. This is why it was repeated.
Self-Colonization School
Kliuchevsky's followers distinguished between various modes of Russia's colonization, such as "free colonization" that was led by private men, mostly runaway serfs and deserted soldiers or Cossacks; "military colonization," which happened as a result of regular campaigns; and "monastery colonization," which was centered around major Orthodox sanctuaries that owned thousands of serfs, carried trade, and built outposts. For them, the trails of Russia's eastward colonization were blazed by fur hunters, beatified by monks, fortified by soldiers, and cultivated by settlers. Their purpose was a systematic, balanced overview of these events that would show the civilizing mission of Russia in the vast, wild expanse of Eurasia. Loyal to the cause of Russian nationalism, Kliuchevsky's school tended to ignore the huge amounts of violence that these colonizing activities entailed. Although it was violence that made necessary all the fences, walls, and towers of the outposts, monasteries, and towns that these historians described in detail, sensitivity to this violence and compassion for its victims came mainly with the next generation of historians, who would experience the Russian revolution, take part in it, and often find themselves either under arrest or in emigration.
A student of Kliuchevsky's, Pavel Miliukov, elaborated on this colonization theme with a new emphasis. As a young professor, Miliukov was dismissed from Moscow University for political activism, was imprisoned, released, and mixed history with politics for decades. In his multi-volume course of Russian history, he realized better than his predecessors how much violence the process of colonization required, and mapped large ethnicities who were either absorbed or exterminated by Russians on their path of colonization. In a special article of the Russian Encyclopedia, Miliukov wrote, "Russia's colonization by the Russian people has continued throughout the whole duration of Russian history and has constituted one of its most characteristic features" (1895: 740).
In the early 1930s, Matvei Liubavsky, a prominent disciple of Kliuchevsky who served as the Rector of Moscow Imperial University until 1917, presented a systematic exploration of the favorite idea of his teacher. Liubavsky (1996) repeated that "Russian history is the history of a country that colonized ceaselessly": instead of the reflective mode that was used by his predecessors, he used a simpler construction - "colonized ceaselessly" rather than "colonized itself." This shift is subtle but significant. It matched a further statement by Liubavsky, that he wrote his treatise as an exploration of "the predominantly external colonization that created the territory of the Russian state." Bringing his long narrative to the late nineteenth century, Liubavsky included a chapter on the colonization of the Baltic lands, which embraces the area of St. Petersburg. Ironically, his book about external colonization ended with a chapter on the colonization of the territory of the imperial capital. But he did write his history of Russia as a history of external colonization - how Russia colonized the others rather than colonized itself - and his awareness of this fact shows that he understood better than his predecessors the political meaning of the concept. His book remained unpublished because he wrote it after he was arrested, interrogated, and exiled to Bashkiria, one of those colonized regions about which he wrote.
In the late imperial period, Russian historiography was dominated by the self-colonization school. From history textbooks, its ideas found their way into encyclopedias. Russian historians wrote detailed accounts of Russia's takeover of the Crimea, Finland, Ukraine, Poland, and other lands. However, they did not describe these areas as Russian colonies. (In this respect, a remarkable exception among Russian authors was Nikolai Iadrintsev, whose book Siberia as a Colony (2003; first published in 1882), was a great example of an anti-imperial history.) Instead of talking about the Russian Empire colonizing the Caucasus or Poland, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky argued that "Russia colonized itself." However, they held a critical stance toward the peculiar character of this particular empire. "As the territory of the Russian state was expanding and the external power of the people growing, the internal freedom of the people was decreasing," wrote Kliuchevsky (1956: 3/8). He used the concept of self- colonization as a shortcut for this "inverse proportion" between the imperial space and internal freedom, a usage that modern philosophers such as Habermas would probably approve. Kliuchevsky's disciples, who saw the worldwide processes of decolonization, reproduced his definition with minor variations. By merging subject and object, this formula provided them with an inverted, maybe even perverted, language that they reserved for talking about Russia and did not use when talking about other parts of the world (Etkind 2002).