The Central Asian population’s barbarism is so glaring, its economic and social condition so degraded, that the sooner European civilisation penetrates into the land, whether from one side or the other, the better.
Whatever the cost, and with all due respect to the law and justice, the question [of colonising Turkestan] must be settled, and with the least possible delay. It concerns not just Russia’s future in Asia, but above all the wellbeing of those under our rule. In truth, they have more to gain from seeing our authority definitively established than to return to their former tyranny …Footnote 1
The author of these two statements is Vasilii Vereshchagin (1842–1904), an acclaimed painter who joined the Russian army during the conquest of Central Asia. An adventurer and larger-than-life personality—he notoriously advised Tsar Nicholas II not to fight the British in India and to pursue, instead, a reconciliation with “the Muslims” in order to fight Japan—Vereshchagin often styled himself as an expert of Asia on account of his first-hand encounters in the region. Indeed, not only did Vereshchagin witness several battles against Khoqandi and Bukharan forces, but he also took an active role in combat, “seizing a rifle from a fallen soldier … and narrowly escaping death,” during the siege of Samarqand in the spring of 1868.Footnote 2 Famously, Vereshchagin’s paintings devoted to Central Asian subjects—a series of works tellingly titled “Barbarians”—embody all the clichés of the consummate Orientalist with the indigenous people often immortalized in acts of brutality and debauchery. One example is a painting dating to 1868 and titled Posle udachi (After a Success) with two Central Asians staring at the head of a Russian soldier severed from its body: one holds it by the hair while the other opens a sack into which the head is to be thrown as a war trophy. Another painting which is representative of Vereshchagin’s Orientalist look at Central Asia is an oil on canvas from 1872 titled Prodazha rebenka-nevolʹnika (Sale of a Child Slave). It features two elderly men examining the body of a naked boy and bargaining over the child’s price, while a third man stands at the door half-open watching to make sure that nobody else is privy to the shameful transaction.
The reason why I have chosen these two examples is not because they stand out for their specific aesthetic features, nor on account of their unique rendering of an Asian-type of brutality or debauchery. In fact, there is much more of the same kind of paintings and I could have chosen among many more devoted to similar subjects: a sorry set of opium eaters; Samarqandis impaling Russian soldiers in the courtyard adjacent to the Sher-Dor madrasa under the watchful eye of the Bukharan emir; a surprise attack by Uzbek forces against an encampment of the Russian army; more Russians’ heads rolling in front of the feet of Central Asian notables; or the majestic “Parlementaires” with Russian soldiers shouting “Surrender! Get the Hell Out!” at two agents employed by the local army to negotiate over capitulation.Footnote 3
Why does Vereshchagin and his exotica warrant our sustained attention these days? After all, his “Sale of a Child Slave” appeared on the front cover of Daniel Brower’s Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire as early as 2003.Footnote 4 Indeed, in the intervening twenty years since the publication of this work, my firm conviction has been that there existed a consensus among scholars, chiefly among historians specializing in the Muslim-majority regions of Central Eurasia, that the Russian empire was as much colonial as any other western empire; and with this in mind, I have always assumed that historians were expected to add texture and color to the social dimension of Russian colonialism. History proved me wrong: after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, historians operating in various research areas ranging from eastern Europe to Central Asia have begun to advocate for the decolonization of Russian history. What this means, however, and how it can be achieved has become a matter of controversy. Seen from an academic perspective, to decolonize Russian history amounts to clearing the rubble of Russian colonialism from our current thinking about the history of the successor countries to the USSR. Others, instead, confer on this agenda a different meaning: to expose the peculiar understanding that Russia today has of its own past, an understanding which is based on a selective reading of the imperial and Soviet past, on the one hand, and the systematic denial or erasure of select aspects from its history, on the other. Furthermore, if to decolonize means a substantial rethinking of approach, methodology, and epistemology, bringing scholars to a more critical engagement with assumptions tied to structures of power and oppression, then historical scholarship on Russian history today cannot properly be called decolonial, as some have noted. It is rather postcolonial in the Fanonian sense of a colonial complex that perpetuates itself in postcolonial conditions.
Regardless of the meaning we attach to it, the current call for decolonizing Russian history is a timely reminder that in many quarters in and out of academia “what is Russian colonialism?” continues to be a nagging question. Time and again over the last three years public commentators and occasional observers alike have brandished Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s (all-too-often-quoted, really) adage that “the history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself,” thereby suggesting that Russia is somehow inoculated against the sins of European colonialism; and the idea of “internal colonization” threatens to also become a variation on the theme of the Sonderweg, nothing else than a fig leaf campaign to cover up how Russia’s mission civilisatrice was premised upon violence and racism, as well as the distortion and obliteration of indigenous cultures. Even though this should have become a truism by now, it would be perhaps useful to quote here Michael Khodarkovsky’s authoritative statement on the subject:
What is remarkable that whether liberal or conservative, Westerniser or Slavophile, the overwhelming majority of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia … maintained that Russia’s expansion avoided the violence associated with European empires and that the Russian empire was fundamentally benevolent towards its imperial non-Christian subjects. This imperial paradigm conveniently excluded millions of the indigenous people who were killed by Russian arms and expelled through Russian policies as the empire expanded into Siberia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. Such cognitive dissonance was not in itself unique to Russia, and many European empires also believed in the munificent nature of their colonial enterprises. What was different, however, was that Russia juxtaposed itself to the Western empires and denied the colonial character of its own.Footnote 5
The controversy surrounding the current discussion on the decolonization of Russian history, however, affords historians an unprecedented opportunity to increase awareness about Russian imperial traits, to rethink the nature of Russian colonialism from the perspectives of their own material, and engage with venues of research so far left unexplored. The obvious point, recognized long ago by scholars of Africa, South Asia, and even Europe itself, is that the agenda of decolonizing a given area of scholarship has nothing to do with locale, and everything to do with the types of questions being asked.
Proceeding from this general premise, the present cluster of articles offers a diametrically different approach to the current academic conversation on Russian colonialism for they bring into conversation extended historiographical reflections (Sean Pollock and Ulrich Hofmeister) together with new archival excavations (Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and Paolo Sartori). Pollock’s point of departure is the recognition that historians have for some time been working collectively and incrementally to show that the decolonization of the Russian history curriculum has in fact a longer pedigree. In the 1950s, the pioneers in the field of Russian imperial history, working mostly with selectively published Russian-language sources and lacking access to Soviet archives and libraries, laid the first stones as best they could. They explicitly set out to focus on questions of Russian imperial expansion and colonization, and the experiences of non-Russians within the tsarist and Soviet polities. This work encouraged historians to study non-Russian peoples in their own terms, using non-Russian languages (when possible) to decenter traditional narratives and to foreground non-Russian perspectives. As the title of this cluster of papers suggests, each “stone” that was laid made it possible to see more clearly the advantages and limitations of the developing and increasingly sophisticated historical methodology. Starting from the 1990s, unprecedented access to the former Soviet archives and training in non-Russian languages has made it increasingly possible for a new generation of historians to move the field forward in ways the pioneers may not have been able to imagine, but nonetheless in concert with their research agenda writ large. To clarify: Pollock’s objective does not amount merely to celebrating past scholarship, for a significant part of the research he refers to is in fact outdated. Rather, his major takeaway is that awareness of the colonial character of Russian imperialism is intrinsic to the history of the discipline, a fact that should further encourage scholars to pursue a direct engagement with the political thought of empire-builders and the techniques of governance that shaped life under Russian colonial rule.
Ulrich Hofmeister compares policies of colonization adopted by Russia in Ukraine and Central Asia and brings into relief their difference. In Ukraine, he argues, such policies amounted to the promotion of settler colonialism, while in Central Asia Russians embraced a civilizing mission designed to improve the life standards of societies which they deemed culturally inferior. The main difference, according to Ulrich, in such policies lies in the extent to which Ukraine and Central Asia were culturally different from Russia: in the case of Ukraine, cultural diversity did not matter much and Ukrainians were thus assimilated into the core of the Russian empire at an early stage; in the case of Central Asia, cultural difference was a prerequisite for Russian governance; hence, the manifest colonial character of Russian rule in the region. It is true of course that Ukrainians became eventually agents of Russian expansion into Asia and the career of the Perovskii brothers is an eloquent example of the Ukrainians’ contribution to colonialism.Footnote 6
Is this enough to settle the question about Russian colonialism in the Pontic steppe? Not yet. Let us zoom out of Ukrainian history and take into account a neighboring region: the Volga-Urals. Danielle Ross’ Tatar Empire has recently shown that Tatars too became an object of assimilation and embraced the cause of imperial expansion much in the same ways Ukrainians did.Footnote 7 While Tatars entered the soslovie in various capacities (nobles, merchants, and clergy), at the same time, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century they also became a target of cultural and political discrimination. In fact, Russian authorities took measures to exclude them from administrative positions in the Muslim-majority colonies of the empire to limit their influence among their coreligionists. It is therefore perfectly legitimate to ask oneself what Tatars’ perceptions of Russian rule were. To be sure, historians have repeatedly noted that the Russian empire adopted different techniques of governance in the Volga-Urals and in Central Asia. The former was part of the core regions of the empire, while the latter was administered by the military assisted by local elites.Footnote 8 However, Tatars’ and Central Asians’ recorded perceptions of Russian rule have much in common, for they range from practices of accommodation and full assimilation to criticism and open hostility. A fine-grained study of indigenous perceptions may therefore facilitate our task of complicating the nature of imperial rule not only in the Pontic steppe, but also elsewhere from Finland to the Baltics and beyond.
Departing significantly from an earlier body of scholarship looking at processes of integrating Muslims into the social texture of the Russian empire, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and Paolo Sartori examine bureaucratic practices of policing and constraining Muslims’ mobility within the empire and across religious boundaries.Footnote 9 Hamed-Troyansky offers a microhistory of a Daghestani merchant trading in Central Asia who in the 1870s was caught in the crosshairs of a spy story. Imprisoned by the Russians for being an Ottoman agent, the North Caucasian peddler’s trading exploits stopped forcibly before growing Russian anxiety about Islam as a global force against colonialism. For a different perspective, Sartori brings together several cases of Slavic settlers attempting to convert from the Russian Orthodox Church to Islam, attempts which in most cases met the colonial authorities’ censure, were openly discouraged, and thus failed ultimately. The stories reconstructed by Hamed-Troyansky and Sartori show how the Russian empire was as much Islamophobic as any other western colonial state formation. Indeed, Russian military officials stationed in the North Caucasus and Central Asia were adamant that Muslims were “intrinsically fanatic” and thus potentially disloyal to the state. Interestingly, this was an opinion largely shared by Orthodox priests and missionaries as well as by Russian Orientalists, who held that institutional changes would inevitably lead to uprisings. Eventually, uprisings did happen, as we know. However, they occurred because of colonial oppression rather than religious fanaticism. Directed mainly at Sufis, Russian Islamophobia manifested itself during the wars against the Imamate in the North Caucasus and spread swiftly to the other regions of the empire with waves of arrests and exiles. It targeted merchants and Muslim scholars who often travelled within and across the borders of the empire to south Asia, western China, and the Middle East.Footnote 10 Islamophobia grew exponentially with Russia’s involvement in the Balkan Wars when, under the accusation of pan-Islamism, thousands of Muslims were thrown into jail and prosecuted for anti-state activities.Footnote 11 When read together, Hamed-Troyansky’s and Sartori’s articles can offer an extended reflection on how the empire controlled, regimented, and policed the boundaries between confessional communities within its own borders.
While papers by Pollock and Hofmeister offer a state-of-the-art discussion of the historiography of Russian colonialism, the contributions of Hamed-Troyansky and Sartori are key to reflecting “ethnographically” on the diversity of historical experiences that one can observe when one zooms in on different colonial situations in the Russian empire. In suggesting that we try to think ethnographically about Russian colonialism, I am not proposing here to embrace a relativist perspective. Rather, what I have in mind is a historiographical agenda that is premised upon the recognition that Russian colonialism represents an irreducibly diverse ensemble of practices and institutions, for colonies were prime sites of sociocultural experimentation. In order to do justice to such a diversity of experiences, historians need first to accumulate more ethnographic illustrations. Once they are able to fill in that gap with all the texture, details, and nuance of real life, then historians will be in position to pursue further empirically substantiated conceptual explorations of Russian colonialism.
Acknowledgements
This cluster of articles originates from the international conference “What is Russian Colonialism?” held in Vienna in early June 2024. I would like to thank the Austrian Academy of Sciences (SICE Kommission), the University of Vienna, and the Cluster of Excellence “Eurasian Transformations” (FWF) for generous funding. This introduction builds on conversations with Wolfgang Mueller, Sean Pollock, Eren Tasar, and other participants of the event to whom goes my gratitude.
