For us Germans the slogan of "inner colonization" is catastrophic. . . . It is no accident that it is always primarily the Jew who tries and succeeds in planting such mortally dangerous modes of thought in our people. . . . Any German internal colonization . . . can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil. (Hitler 1969: 125, 128)
Boomerang Effect
In the 1920s, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci characterized the relations between different regions of his country, the north and the south, as colonial exploitation. Better than his predecessors, he realized the internal complexity of this intra-ethnic colonization. Its cultural vector, which he called hegemony, diverged from its political vector (domination) and its economic vector (exploitation). All three had to be considered separately, because their directions were different or even the opposite. Regions of southern Italy became northern Italy's "exploited colonies" but, at the same time, the culture of the south strongly influenced that of the north (Gramsci 1957: 28, 48). In fact, it was due to the internal structure of Italian colonialism that
Gramsci was able to separate these elements of power, which correlate and stick to each other in many situations of external, overseas colonization. Revising the Marxist teaching that the economic basis determines the "superstructure," Gramscian concepts of hegemony and domination proved to be seminal for cultural and postcolonial studies. Conceived in Italy, they have been applied in India and elsewhere (Guha 1997).
Speculating about the relations between "power," which in her writing was close to hegemony, and violence, Hannah Arendt described the "boomerang effect" that an imperial government would bring to the mother country from the colonies if the violence against the "subject races" spread to the imperial nation, so that "the last 'subject race' would be the English themselves." Arendt suggested that some British imperial administrators (she referred to Lord Cromer) were aware of the boomerang of violence, and this "much- feared effect" constrained their actions in India or Africa (Arendt 1970: 54). With its aboriginal roots, the boomerang metaphor summarized the old, Kantian nightmare that the European peoples would be ruled as if they were savages who could not rule themselves. Anthropologists have repeatedly stressed the role of European colonies as "the laboratories of modernity," which tested the newest technologies of power (Stoler 1995: 17). When the mother countries implemented selected methods of colonial power at home, they appropriately adjusted their functions. The project of the Panopticon, which was first devised as a factory by the adventurous Brits in a Russian colony in Ukraine and later used as a prison in England and elsewhere, is a good example of this creative process (see Chapter 7).
This boomerang imagery was crucial for Arendt's major contribution, Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), which surveyed the Soviet and Nazi regimes under one cover along with a variety of western colonies. Despite the long-standing fascination with Arendt's theoretical ideas, this part of her legacy has been discussed primarily by her earliest as well as her most recent critics (Pietz 1988; Rothberg 2009; Mantena 2010). Still, with one significant exception (Boym 2010), the scholarship on Arendt's Origins focuses on its German story and downplays the massive Russian-Soviet part of this study. Indeed, Arendt's focus on the pan-Slavic movement as a step in the development of Russian and European racism was not productive for her project. The pan-Slavic movement was a dead-end; it did not lead to the Russian revolution and Soviet totalitarianism in the way that Arendt described. Arendt's idea of the boomerang effect was brilliant, but in application to Russia it needed mediation by an understanding of Russian imperialism as an internal, and not only external, affair. The long-standing traditions of violence and coercion with which the Russian Empire treated its own peasantry could explain the revolution and totalitarianism as a boomerang coming home to the cities, the capitals, and the state. The revolutionary state absorbed the practices and experiences that the Empire projected onto its subject peoples, including the Russians. Unlike the German boomerang that, according to Arendt, flew back across the high seas from the colonies to the heartlands, the Russian boomerang whirled through the internal machinery of the empire. Totalitarianism, Soviet style, was a logical result of this effect.
Talking about the influx of race imagery from the colonies to Europe during the English and French revolutions, Michel Foucault generalized:
It should never be forgotten that while colonization . . . transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West. . . . A whole series of the colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself. (2003: 103)
Tashkent, but it is there that he would receive a critical experience that enabled him to "civilize" Russia. In several funny stories, the gentlemen from Tashkent beat and bribe the gentlemen in Petersburg, assuming it as a part of their civilizing mission. If you find yourself in a town that has a prison and does not have a school, you are in the heart of Tashkent, wrote the satirist. Like Major Kovalev who lost his nose when he returned from the Caucasus, the imperial returnees confront a catastrophe that they purposefully create and deeply misunderstand. Focusing on the return arc of the imperial boomerang, from the colony to the mother country, Saltykov- Shchedrin defined the internal Orient - in his terms, "Tashkent-ness" - as a combination of violence and ignorance that he discerned in the exchange between the Russian center and its colonies (Saltykov- Shchedrin 1936: 10/29-280).
Two great struggles, inconsistent but emancipatory, dominated the end of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first century: decolonization of the Third World and de-Sovietization of the Second World. Historically, these two struggles have been intertwined. Intellectually, they have been kept separate. But starting from the age of the Enlightenment, academic history has experienced its own boomerang effect: the knowledge of the colonization and decolonization processes in the east illuminates the understanding of the west.
Recent decades have seen a historiographical revolution that has been mostly focused on the role of the state, coercion, and war in the creation of the modern world (Tilly 1990; Bartlett 1993; Mann 1996). Michael Mann observes that in modern history, settler colonies of democratic countries were more murderous than the colonies of authoritarian empires. Liberal democracies were built on the back of ethnic cleansing, which took the form of institutional coercion in mother countries and of mass murder in the colonies. As long as empires were able to sustain the plural "sociospatial networks of power" in their diverse parts, they could escape massive bloodshed. With the transition to the "organic view of society," empires break into nation-states, a process which is usually accompanied by large- scale violence. New nation-states regulate their complexity by redrawing boundaries, organizing population transfers, and sanctioning ethnic cleansing. For Mann (2005), this is the "dark side of democracy," the modern heart of darkness, to use an older metaphor.
In Russia, organic nationalism started during the Napoleonic Wars and was maturing all the way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marking one of its turning points. The fact that it has never fully matured explains both the weakness of Russian democracy and the relative bloodless- ness of recent Russian transformations (Hosking 1997). Despite their defining importance for the modern world, these processes have been under-theorized. In a rare postcolonial response to the post-Soviet transformation, David Chioni Moore describes a situation that he calls "the double silence." Postcolonial experts stay silent about the former Soviet sphere and Sovietologists stay silent about postcolonial ideas. Moore gives two separate explanations to this double effect. For many postcolonial scholars, some of them Marxist-leaning, the socialist world seems a better alternative to global capitalism; they do not wish to extend their critical vision from the latter to the former. Many post-socialist scholars have cultivated their new European identities; they do not wish to compare their experience with Asian or African colleagues (Moore 2001: 115-17). Several commentators have shared Moore's surprise (Condee 2006, 2008; Buchowski 2006; Chari and Verdery 2009). Both sides suffer from the disjunction between the postcolonial and the post-socialist. This disconnect is largely responsible for the much-deplored depoliticiza- tion of postcolonial studies and for the methodological parochialism that many Russianists have lamented. The reasons for this disconnect are both political and academic. As Nancy Condee put it: "[T]he intellectual Left's silence about the Second world and the Right's anticommunist preoccupations were interrelated processes, mutually enforcing constraints" (2008: 236). I would add only that in the twenty-first century, the continuation of the Left's silence about the past and the lasting present of the Second World can be explained only by inertia.