The discourse of self-colonization was a specific, though long-term and surprisingly robust, moment in Russian historiography. Living in the age of colonial empires and working for a country that competed with these empires, leading Russian historians found the language of colonization appropriate and necessary for their work. However, they transformed the western idea of colonization in quite a radical way. First, in Russia, the process of colonization was construed as self- referential and internal, rather than as object-directed and external. Second, in Russia, we often find approval of the processes of colonization, which is different from the British and French historiographi- cal traditions and from the strongly ideological, postcolonial approach to colonization. Whereas twentieth-century historians generally denounced imperialism, their nineteenth-century predecessors did not always use "colonial" words in a critical way. Even Shchapov, a pariah and exile, admired the heroism of those who accomplished the colonization of a large country. The most critical among historians of Russian self-colonization, Miliukov, became a hawkish politician as Minister of Foreign Affairs. His objective in World War I was to take Constantinople for Russia.
Soviet historians largely abandoned the discourse of self-colonization: it did not fit the class approach and the idea of the socialist commonwealth. In late nineteenth-century Russia, colonization was still perceived as progress; in the Soviet Union, it was reactionary and Russia's history was supposed to have little to do with it. A student of Kliuchevsky, who became his Soviet biographer, counted the concept of Russia's colonization among his weaker ideas (Nechkina 1974: 427). However, the colonization paradigm continued in the work of a largely forgotten group of political geographers, led by Veniamin Semenov-Tian-Shansky (1915; Polian 2001). For a while, the Soviet activities in the Arctic continued under the name of colonization, which engaged some historians of the Kliuchevsky school (Ocherki 1922; Holquist 2010a). Ironically, the colonial terminology vanished from official discourse in the early 1930s, when the Soviet government implemented the most massive and brutal methods of colonization, by the forced labor of the gulag prisoners.
To conclude, the historians of the self-colonization school were not anti-imperialist thinkers; they were not particularly critical toward Russian imperial appropriations. Their historiographical tradition was secular, liberal, and nationalist. Like some Russian rulers before them, these historians were engaged in "cross-imperial knowledge acquisition" (Stoler 2009: 39), which connected the Russian Empire to other empires of the world via relations of selective and sometimes reciprocal mimesis. The notebooks of the all-time leader of this tradition, Kliuchevsky, surprise the reader with the political despair that is hidden in his famous course of lectures: "In the Europe of kings, Russia was a decisive force; in the Europe of nations, Russia is but a thick log that is caught in an eddy" (2001: 406). Three generations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian historians, whose teachings and textbooks constitute the core of Russian historiography, disagreed about many features of the Russian past but there was one formula that they kept repeating one after the other: "Russia colonized itself."
Barrels of Fur
Historians write from the past to the present, but think from the present to the past. Twenty-first-century Russia's successes and problems are plentiful; along with some others, I believe that the dependency on oil and gas exports is an important source of many of them (see, e.g., Ross 2001; Friedman 2006; Goldman 2008). But I intend to show that a resource dependency far predates post-Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union.
Protego Ergo Obligo
Suppose that some valuable resource, say a rare metal, is available at a single spot on earth. The labor theory of value does not work there; the price of the metal is not dependent upon the labor that is needed for mining this metal. Since the whole population depends on the redistribution of income that comes from a single spot, this state has no reason to develop the governance mechanisms that enable fair taxation, competition, and rule of law. The security costs are serious because the state that owns this spot would likely have many enemies. The transportation costs are also substantial, because this spot is likely to be far from the traditional centers of population, which developed according to an entirely different logic. Growth in the resource-bound state requires relatively little labor or knowledge. Instead, it develops a security apparatus that protects the source of wealth and its transportation routes, and a bureaucracy that redistributes the wealth and demands respect.
Political philosophers have always known that those who provide security tend to grasp property. "The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state," wrote Carl Schmitt (1976, 56; see also Bates 2001). In our hypothetical case it means that the group that trades the resource is the same group that protects the state. Besides the classical monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, as it was defined by Max Weber, such a state develops a monopoly over the legitimate trade of its resource: a double monopoly that could be best compared to a Mobius strip, with one side managing the resource, and another side managing security, and both sides smoothly merging with each other (Etkind 2009).
Let us also imagine that the state controls a territory that is larger than the spot with the valuable resource, and there are many people living everywhere in the land. This situation creates a rigid, caste-like structure. Two classes of citizens emerge: the small elite of producers who extract, protect, and trade the resource, and others whose existence depends on the redistribution of the rent that this trade provides. The state is fully dependent on the trading group; moreover, these indispensable people are the state. But this state does not necessarily ignore the people; it provides them with security and other goods, indeed all that can be done after the state satisfies its own needs. Human capital does not determine the wealth of this nation. On the contrary, the resource-bound state provides charity to the people.
In a neighboring land, which I call labor-bound, the work of citizens creates the wealth of a nation. There is no other source of wealth there than the competitive work of its citizens. Value is created by labor; this old axiom still works in this economy. The state taxes this labor and has no other income. The health and education of the citizens are not only in their best interest but also in the interests of the state, because the better they work, the more taxes they pay. But then, these happy citizens find out that the growth of their economy depends on a resource they do not have. As they buy more and more of this resource, its price grows, production diminishes with depletion, and labor becomes relatively cheaper than the resource. From now on, both trading states become resource-bound. Nothing on earth could change this common dependency unless the labor-bound society focuses a part of its creative labor on substituting the deficient resource with something that it has in abundance.
This process has not occurred with oil, but many centuries ago it did happen with another valuable resource.
A Divine Marvel
In a lively tale dated 1096, the Primary Chronicle describes the first resource curse in Russian history: