Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013
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Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. 264 pp. ISBN: 9780745651309, Hardback Price £55.00, Paperback Price £17.99.
Reviewed by
Comenius University in Bratislava
The concept of colonisation, classically understood as the process of domination in which colonisers migrate to and settle in colonised lands, and the concept of imperialism, classically understood as the process of domination which does not involve resettlement, are often perceived through the model of the British Empire, the accepted prototype of western colonialism. Much overlooked is the Russian model of colonisation. Since the 1990s, following the dissolution of the USSR, to the present day, whether or not postcolonial theory can apply to post-Soviet countries has been an ongoing debate. Soviet historians tend to reject the concept of colonisation in Imperial Russia as it does not fit the idea of the social commonwealth. The irony lies in the fact that, in the early 1930s, the colonial terminology disappeared in the official discourse even when the gulag system, the most brutal method of colonisation, was implemented by the Soviet government. The study of postcolonial theories and Russian historiography has not been free from ideology and the East versus West dichotomy. The institution of the Russian Empire and the legacy of Russian serfdom, abolished at the same time as slavery in America, form an understudied topic often reduced to footnotes in history textbooks. Alexander Etkind, in Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, challenges such a double standard in academia, of which postcolonial critics should be highly critical, through his analysis of the Russian Empire, its ideology and otherisation. In the introductory section, Etkind draws attention to the vast territorial expanse of the empire which covered 65 million square kilometre years, rendering incomparable the British Empire’s territory of 45 million square kilometre years and the Roman Empire’s territory of 30 million square kilometre years. “Technically and psychologically, wrote Etkind, “India was closer to London than many areas of the Russian Empire were to St. Petersburg” (5). The vastness of the Russian Empire intensifies as well as prolongs the process of its colonisation which is self-referential, the kind which Etkind refers to as “internal colonisation”. The fundamental difference between British and Russian colonisation lies in the notion that, unlike the British Empire, the Russian Empire domesticated its own heartlands and thereby colonised its own peoples. The reason Russia’s cultural history has been given stereotypical characteristics of confusion and incompleteness is that it is often understood and explained through the orientalist paradigm by western theorists who are more familiar with the British Empire model. Otto von Bismarck has famously compared the British mode of colonial expansion to a whale and the Russian mode of colonial expansion to a bear. Etkind’s work confirms the notion that “[t]he Russian Empire defined its others by estate and religion; western empires defined them by geography and race” (252). By appropriating postcolonial terminology and radically transforming readers’ views on postcolonial theory in his study of Russian internal colonisation, Etkind reveals the unique and complex subversion of the dialectical relations between the colonising elite and the colonised subject of the Russian Empire. Since “otherness” in Russian colonisation is constructed upon the social estates system, which is class-based instead of race-based, the imperial elite felt that they were the invading “other” within their communities or even within their alienated “selves”. The centre and periphery dichotomy prevalent in postcolonial discourses is also revised as the people on the periphery of the Russian Empire lived better than those in the central provinces. As an incentive to cultivate the vast land, the Russian Empire offered foreigners economic privileges over Russians. Foreigners were exempted from serfdom, to which only Russians and Eastern Slavs were subject. The periphery, in the case of the Russian Empire, therefore was the centre of revolutionary ideas and activities. Reforms originated on the periphery and spread to the heartland. The centre, or the empire’s heartland, therefore was the periphery where the Russian Empire established colonies by means of military force and by means of resettling foreigners. It is in the heartlands where souls of serfs were owned by nobles and where exotic communes were “discovered” by the urban intelligentsia: “The characteristic phenomena of colonialism, such as missionary work, exotic journeys, and ethnographic scholarship, were directed inwards toward the Russian village as well as outwards and overseas. Expanding into huge spaces, Russia colonized its own people” (251).
For literary scholars, Alexander Etkind’s book is most insightful in its focus on Russian literature and its legacy, which readers tend to overlook. Russian literature’s canonical works were created by the marginalised group of people who suffered political persecution. The centre and the periphery binary is once again subverted and this therefore serves as a challenge to the classic postcolonial paradigm. “British admirers,” wrote Etkind, “compared Gandhi to Tolstoy just as often as Franz Fanon or the writers of the Harlem Renaissance cited Dostoevsky. One group of writers belonged to an imperial elite, the other to the colonized peoples, but the similarities between them turned out to be more important than the differences” (254). Moreover, Etkind’s analysis of Russian historiography and literary texts offer a new way of reading and understanding the works of at least two canonical writers in the pantheon of British Modernist literature which I would like to put on centre stage in this review: Joseph Conrad and Aldous Huxley.
Joseph Conrad, or Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was born in the Ukrainian-Jewish town of Berdyczów, one of Russian Empire’s colonised lands. He was born to a family of Russian subjects who were part of the colonial administration. His father and grandfather managed leaseholds on land estates in Western Ukraine, which became part of the Russian Empire after the second partition in Poland in 1793. Józef’s father, Apollow Korzeniowski, who was both a colonial manager of land estates in Ukraine and a colonised victim of the Russian Empire, became an anti-imperialist underground fighter for the emancipation of Poland and, as a result, was arrested by the Russian authority in October 1861. Apollow Korzeniowski’s double experience as a coloniser and a colonised mirrors that of Russia itself. Russia was not only a colonial empire like Britain but also a colonised territory like Congo. Russian culture was the dominant colonist culture but, at the same time, it was exoticised and perceived by the west in orientalist terms. Apollow Korzeniowski’s double roles as a coloniser and a colonised can also be seen reflected in his son’s works, particularly the one most read and taught as part of the modernist and postcolonial literature curricula. Inarguably a classic postcolonial text depicting Belgian colonial rule and its colonial enterprise in Africa, Heart of Darkness, as Etkind posits in his book, is nevertheless tinged with references to the tragedy of Russian colonisation of Poland. Readers often overlook the fact that the story of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is recounted to the Londoner in Africa by a man from a place called Tambov:
‘Don't you talk with Mr. Kurtz?’ I said. ‘You don't talk with that man—you listen to him,’ he exclaimed with severe exaltation. ‘But now—’ He waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump, possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he gabbled: 'Brother sailor... honour... pleasure... delight... introduce myself... Russian... son of an arch-priest... Government of Tambov... What? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly. Smoke? Where's a sailor that does not smoke?’ (159)
Tambov is a city located on the south-southeast of Moscow. The Tambov Governorate was one of the largest governments of Central Russia. It served as an important administrative unit of the Russian Empire. The Russian elements in Kurtz’s story should not be overlooked. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, readers find traces of the memories of Russian massacres in Poland and Conrad’s feelings about his visit to Congo. The “heart of darkness” means not only Congo as a physical place, but also the Russian method of colonisation, epitomised by Kurtz himself. Kurtz not only goes native but also usurps the native system of beliefs by establishing himself as the god of native rites and rituals. Not seeking to replace the old belief system with his own foreign one, Kurtz efficiently installs himself as the centre of the native’s world and subtly brainwashes the natives to make it their sole purpose of existence to suffer for him and offer sacrifices to him. Kurtz’s colonisation mirrors Russian Empire’s internal colonisation. His mode of practice mirrors the Narodnik, or the “go to the people” (Хождение к народу), movement which was prevalent after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The Narodniks were a group of intelligentsia who left the cities for the villages, in some cases, who even married peasant women and referred to the peasants in ethnographic terminology, hence replicating the west and east dichotomy and sustaining the orientalist discourse. Their aim was to instill in the peasant communities a moral imperative to revolt against the Tsarist regime. Though the Narodnik movement did not yield concrete outcome in its time as it was more a religious and cultural movement than a political one, Joseph Conrad saw the parallels between Kurtz’s Narodnik-like method of mental as well as violent physical colonisation and the Russian Empire’s method of internal colonisation. The latter yielded more devastating results, with “the horror” of humanity’s darkness as the heart of the enterprise, of which legacy can still be felt in post-Soviet countries to this day.
Though Aldous Huxley’s experience of the Russian Empire was much more indirect and limited compared with Joseph Conrad’s, Russian internal colonisation is vividly played out in Brave New World, a text which has been regarded as a prototype of dystopian literature. To see the “Russian connection” in one of the memorable works of British literature and to understand the impact of Russian internal colonisation on Huxley’s prediction of the future which is as bleak and dark as Heart of Darkness, Etkind recounts the story of René Fülöp-Miller, an Austrian writer and Sigmund Freud’s editor. Having visited Moscow in the 1920s, Fülöp-Miller posited in his book entitled The Mind and Face of Bolshevism that the Bolsheviks appropriated the rites and rituals of the Khlysty, a mysterious and mystical underground sect which broke off from the Russian Orthodox Church, as part of their populist strategy. It is precisely Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, a book Aldous Huxley was reviewing while writing Brave New World, which inspired Huxley to base his futuristic scene of group sex ritual on the accounts of the Khlysty’s mythical orgy in nineteenth-century Imperial Russia.
By offering a radical way of reading the socio-cultural as well as political history of the Russian Empire and by offering a new and enriching way of reading canonical texts which readers tend to find “too familiar”, Alexander Etkin’s Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience sets out to “defamiliarise” the classic postcolonial theories which remain western eurocentric in its double standard. Again, true to the book’s title and achievement, it is not widely known that the term and concept of “defamiliarisation”, or остранение, coined by the Russian formalist Viktor Skhlovsky as part of his theory of estrangement, was based on his analysis of the songs of the Khlysty, the colonial “other” of Imperial Russia’s erotic and exotic obsession. Etkin’s book delights and surprises readers. His in-depth study and analysis of the Russian Empire propels readers to revise their understanding of colonisation and the colonial enterprise as well as to rethink everything they have learnt about postcolonialism and the empire.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Ed. and Intro. Cedric Watts. Oxford
World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2011.