The decline of the colonies started in the 1870s, when the imperial administration broke its promise by subjecting them to conscription and introducing Russian in their schools. In response, thousands of sectarians sold their land and left for North America. Ethnographic studies of these immigrants in America reveal that, even decades later, their local co-religionists perceived them as "Russians" (Kloberdanz 1975). About a million German descendants of the "colonists" stayed in Russia and Ukraine. They suffered terribly during the revolution and civil war of 1917-19, famines on the Volga in 1921- 2 and 1932 - 3, and the massive deportations in 1937 - 8 that were ordered by Stalin's government. At the start of World War II, Alfred Rosenberg claimed all the land in southern Russia that was cultivated by Germans for the German Empire; this land, he said, was larger than all the plowed land of England (Yampolsky 1994: 165). A Baltic German who studied engineering in Moscow and loved to quote Dostoevsky, Rosenberg had educated Hitler in his early Nazi organization, "Reconstruction: Economic and Political Association for the East." He later became Hitler's Minister for the Eastern Territories during World War II (Kellogg 2005). The memory of German colonies provides some historical context to bizarre statements made by Hitler, such as "the Volga must be our Mississippi" (Blackbourn 2009: 152). It so happened that the battle of Stalingrad took place around the prosperous colony of Sarepta, which was created in Russia by the industrious, non-violent Germans.
Panopticon
In his famous rediscovery of the Panopticon, Michel Foucault (2003) did not mention that its first invention took place in Russia. The
British naval engineer Samuel Bentham traveled there in 1780. He was invited by Prince Potemkin to perform a wide variety of duties, from ship-building to brewing beer. In 1785, Potemkin invited Jeremy Bentham as well. The Bentham brothers worked in Krichev, one of Potemkin's estates in the newly conquered Belarusian lands. Foreigners on the Potemkin estates were exempt from all taxes for five years. The land where Ukrainians, Jews, and Tartars had lived for centuries was being quickly settled by the colonists, most of them Germans and Greeks. Jeremy Bentham served as a secretary, while Samuel received the rank of Russian colonel. British industry was introduced into the Potemkin villages by military force. Samuel, however, was resourceful and flexible. He built an amphibious boat, which could be driven by oars in the water and run on wheels on land. He also built a "vermicular vessel," which could follow the course of Russian rivers. However, the Bentham brothers' major invention in Krichev was the Panopticon. It was a structure that combined the functions of factory and dormitory. The windows of the round-shaped multi- storied building looked inwards toward its courtyard. In the center there was a tower, which was devised in such a way that the workers would believe that they were under surveillance, whether the tower was empty or not, thereby creating the "apparent omnipresence" of power (Bentham 1995). British bricklayers started to build two such structures, in Krichev and further south, in Kherson. In Krichev, Jeremy Bentham wrote his treatise, Panopticon, which made him famous. The actual constructions, however, were not completed, because of the outbreak of another Russo-Turkish war and the unexpected sale of Potemkin's estate (Pypin 1869; Christie 1993; Etkind 2001a; Stanziani 2008).
Samuel Bentham was involved in the construction of an even more famous architectural phenomenon, the Potemkin village. Facades erected along the path of the Empress, who was heading south along the Dnieper river in 1787, the decorated villages deceived the eye with their splendor. In their games with truth, power, and vision, both inventions, the Bentham Panopticon and the Potemkin villages, wonderfully complemented each other. In fact, two key strategies of power - visual control and visible fiction - combined in the project of the Panopticon. It was while living on Grigory Potemkin's estate that Jeremy Bentham started to work on his famous theory of fictions. As if summarizing his various interests, the word "panoptikum," defined as a collection of sights and curiosities, entered Russian and German languages. Samuel Bentham traveled twice to Siberia and in 1788, presented Potemkin with a new project, a voyage to America: he wanted to sail from Siberia, land on the Pacific coast, and reach New York with a detachment of Russian soldiers under his command. Potemkin showed little enthusiasm, so Bentham went instead for a vacation to England (Christie 1993: 253). He did not return, but, in accordance with his advice, a Panopticon was actually built near St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Okhta river in 1807. This time, it was designed as a shipbuilding wharf and school. The six-rayed building was 12 meters high, with a lift in the middle, so that all five floors of the building could be seen from the central tower (Priamursky 1997). On exactly the same spot where this panoptical structure stood, the Russian gas and oil corporation Gazprom was planning to build its headquarters, an enormous, cucumber-like tower that symbolized its power overseeing the land. This controversial project was suspended in 2010.
Conceived in Russia as a factory, the Panopticon was used in England as a prison. Jeremy Bentham left Russia in late 1787. Much later he wrote to Alexander I that two years in Krichev brought him "the richest observations" of his life. While Bentham saw the Napoleonic Code as "mere chaos," he proposed that the tsar adopt a new all-embracing legislation, which would all follow, as if from a central tower, from the principle of the general good (Pypin 1869). Time passed, and the project of the Panopticon caught the eye of Foucault. The Brits invented the Panopticon for a Russian colony and redesigned it for the Russian capital; nearly 200 years later, in Paris, it was redescribed as the prototype for all disciplinary practices.
Military Self-Colonization
After the victorious war with Napoleon, the Empire launched another large-scale colonial experiment. The returning veterans of the army that took Paris settled in newly constructed settlements, where they did the plowing and drilling. These large, scientifically organized plantations were first established near Novgorod, in the very heart of Russia; later, they were created in Ukraine and elsewhere. About a third of the imperial army was settled this way, and there were plans to locate all the infantry in northern Russia and the cavalry in the southern provinces (Pipes 1950). To create the necessary space, the local peasantry were resettled or mixed with the soldiers. The manor houses in these areas were bought for a symbolic price and the owners were forced to move out. In the bureaucratic documents of the time, routinely written in French, the new administrative units were called colonies; in Russian documents, they were called settlements. As happened in nineteenth-century France and its overseas colonies (Stoler 2009: 37), the Russified terms "colonist" and "colony" acquired multiple, interconnected referents. In various discourses, it could apply to an orphanage in Central Russia, a military settlement in Ukraine, a penal camp in Siberia, an outpost in the Caucasus, or a huge domain in Central Asia.
All military colonies were included in one imperial structure that was led by the artillerist Aleksei Arakcheev (1769-1834). Life in these colonies mixed various cultural elements. Bachelors married women who were chosen by their superiors, though one witness wrote that couples were chosen by lottery, exactly as with the Hernhutters (Petrov 1871: 159). Boys were educated in the "Lancasterian schools," which emphasized a system of mutual education, with the more advanced children helping to teach the less advanced. Invented by a British Quaker, Joseph Lancaster (1778 - 1838), these schools were popular in the English and Spanish colonies. Every colony had a standard plan, with a central square, huge public edifices, and an observation tower. On Arakcheev's estate, he had a particularly tall observation point which one of his better-informed guests compared to the Panopticon (Svin'in 2000: 143). Military colonies were outposts in a land that was foreign to them, and the purpose of their planners was to make these spaces entirely different from Russia. The Minister of Internal Affairs, Viktor Kochubei, wrote to Arakcheev that leaving a colony was like being "thrown from a land of education to a country of barbarism," as if by "some revolution of the globe" (Kartsev 1890: 87). Even now, the enormous ruins of colonial, classicist edifices stick out of the woods and marshes, with a local population insufficient to reuse its abundant brick.