There is much that is exciting and much that is exaggerated in Foucault's narrative of the European race wars (Stoler 1995). Unlike his many other ideas, this peculiar emphasis on European races has not been integrated in the main body of the contemporary humanities; the leading American theorists of race, enthusiastic followers of Foucault in some other respects, have declined to assess the contrast or similarities between their "race" and Foucault's. Rather than pointing at weaknesses in Foucault's arguments, I wish to transfer the focus closer to my subject. There was an important moment in Russian historiography that closely followed the script that Foucault portrayed in his course, the struggle between race and class in the interpretation of history. In the mid-nineteenth century, two historians from Kazan, Stepan Eshevsky and his student Afanasii Shchapov, produced an important body of racial history. Soon, their work was overshadowed by two historians from Moscow, Sergei Soloviev and his student Vasilii Kliuchevsky, who devised the Russian version of social history as the history of estates.
An old Tartar capital, Kazan was taken by Russian troops in 1552, which was a huge step in Russia's empire-building. Throughout almost all of the nineteenth century, the university there was the easternmost one in the Empire. It was the site of unusual achievements in scholarship, such as Nikolai Lobachevsky's "imaginary geometry," which was built on the assumption that parallel lines converge. Eshevsky's history was also counterintuitive but was more closely linked to the local, Russian and Tartar, realities. An expert in ancient and early medieval Europe, Eshevsky taught courses such as "The Center of the Roman World and its Provinces" and "Races in Russian History," which presented unusually rich and balanced narratives of colonization, resistance, and transcultural exchange. The guiding idea of his courses was the unconquered spirit of the colonized peoples, which enriched the imperial culture and survived it. He observed a similar dialectics in his contemporary Russia and even in America. In 1864, he began his course on race at Moscow University with an extended reference to the American Civil War: "However great the significance of race is for the political life of the United States, it is even more important for scholarly history" (Eshevsky 1870: 22). He believed that it was an achievement of science to be able to look at humanity not just as "an indifferent mass, everywhere and always the same," but as divided into races, which had physical and spiritual manifestations. For him, races were recognizable and stable, but he also emphasized their internal complexity and ability to merge, mix, and change. Pursuing a synthesis between history, linguistics, and ethnography, Eshevsky responded critically to the field of physical anthropology, the nineteenth-century science of races. He distinguished between two concepts, creolization and hybridization. The difference is that animal hybrids cannot reproduce, but mixing human races gives prolific results. He surveyed and rejected the racist idea that the fate of creoles was degeneration; on the contrary, he described the mulatto and other mixes as more viable and productive than pure races. While his famous French contemporary, Arthur de Gobineau, claimed that "the fall of civilization is due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood" (cited in Arendt 1966: 172), Eshevsky celebrated the racial mixing that he saw as the source of progress, in Russia as well as in America. Races are analogous to breeds rather than species, humanity is one whole, and historical change is not a process of racial displacement and substitution but a process of racial mixing and absorption. This course on race, taught at Moscow Imperial University in 1864, was remarkably anti-racist even in comparison to the later ideas of the so-called "liberal anthropology" (Mogilner 2008).
Revising concepts of colonial anthropology helped Eshevsky to offer a new view on Russian history. A large part of European Russia was originally populated by the Finnish race, taught Eshevsky. At the start of the recorded history, the Finns lived not only where Novgorod stands, but also where Moscow is located; in the earlier period they lived as far to the south as Kiev. However, they were all substituted by the Slavs.
What does it mean? History does not know about the deportation of the Finns, or even less so, their systematic extermination by the Russians. . . . The process occurred inconspicuously. There is no memory of the bloody race war in the Russian chronicles or in folk legends. However, only Russians live now in the purely Finnish land that was populated by the purely Finnish tribes; and these are the Russians who believe that they are the purest, the most typical Russians. (Eshevsky 1870: 97)
The Slavs did not have firearms like Cortez or superior organization like the Romans. They could not exterminate the Finns, but they mixed with them and absorbed them. Referring to his own observations in Kazan, where he watched "all the grades of absorption of the Tartars and the Finns by the Russians," Eshevsky claimed that only this peaceful process of intermixing could explain the growth of the Russian people. It had left no historical memory because of its gradual, non-violent character. Remarkably, Eshevsky imagined a process that both Lenin and Foucault denied for purely theoretical or rather, ideological reasons: a non-violent, gradual racial mixing.
Negative Hegemony
One idea proved seminal for Russian letters: that while the fruits are national, the roots are foreign. The source of strength and pride should be sought outside among others, even among very distant others ranging from the Vikings to the Amazons. A classical example is the ode that Gavriil Derzhavin, a poet who also served as the governor of Tambov, the Minister of Justice, etc., wrote to Catherine II in 1782. According to the convention of its genre, the ode depicts
Catherine as the embodiment of virtues and the author as a humble subject climbing the ladder of perfection. "The Kyrgyzes-Kaisaks" (now called Kazakhs), the nomadic tribes of the later Orenburg province, had just been brought under Russian sovereignty, and the ode celebrates this event. However, its rich oriental symbolism is so unusual that this ode became a puzzle for many generations of scholars. It is not that the German-born Empress is presented as the source of the westernizing influence and Derzhavin, who was of Tartar blood, as her oriental subject. On the contrary, the Empress is called "the God-like Tsarina of the horde of the Kyrgyzes-Kaisaks," her Russian courtiers are called "murzas" (the Tartar nobility), and the whole Empire is transposed into the Orient, a fairytale space somewhere between "Baghdad, Smyrna, and Cashmere." While the humbler narrator tames his passions in the process of a personal Enlightenment that had, no doubt, European origins, he identifies his sovereign with her base oriental subjects. This is not a satire or parody; this is an ode, for which success in the court testified to the seriousness of the orientalization process. Reversing the order of domination, this exoticizing vision of sovereignty signaled the early and deep revision of the European legacy of orientalism as it was appropriated by Russian literature.
The Russian romantic novel often depicted love between partners who are racially or socially unequal, presenting the death of one of them as a sacrificial mechanism that reveals the deep dynamics of the underlying historical situation (see Chapter 11). In stories of external colonization, it was love between an imperial officer and a native beauty, as in Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus and Lermontov's "Bela." In both stories, love is fatal to the native woman and both of the male characters, Russian officers, are clearly blamed for causing the deaths of their loving, noble savages. This recurrent plot effectively redeems, I would even say deconstructs, the imperialist slogans that one can find in the very same texts. The apparent contradiction between the structure of the romance and the explicit ideology of prologues and epilogues creates a dynamic that has long interested readers.