Reflective Colonization: Domination, Consent, and the Self in Imperial Russia

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Russian Politics ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Historical Periods

Historians have pointed out that as a terrestrial rather than an overseas empire, the Russian empire has had to grapple with a blurry boundary between imperial center and periphery. Ektind goes a step further to show that the Russian empire was the stage for intensive colonization of the imperial core itself and the attendant processes of self-orientalization and self-alienation. The review identifies and explores three dimensions of the process of internal colonization. In the first, colonization by consent, Russian historical writers’ interpretations of the origins of the state in terms of consent to (foreign) domination are contextualized by drawing on colonizers’ fantasy of consent across contexts and historical periods, and by pointing to resistance as an important aspect of the relation between Russian imperial elites and the colonized. The second dimension is the idea of colonizing “one’s own,” whereby elites not only coerced people of the imperial core into various practices, but also viewed them through an orientalizing lens, and this, from the beginnings of serfdom through the nineteenth-century populists’ efforts at rapprochement (the perceived divide between rulers and ruled is, it is argued, still salient in Russian politics). The last dimension, strangers to ourselves, deals with the “splitting of the self” from a postcolonial studies perspective but it is pointed out that the use of psychoanalytic frameworks and literary theory may reproduce orientalist interpretations of the Russian imperial self. Instead, it is argued that self-orientalizing discourses in the Russian context may serve to divert attention away from one’s actual power.

scholarly journals On Emotional Grounds: Private Communication of Muslims in Late Imperial Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-682
Author(s):  
Alfrid Bustanov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Private Communication ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
New Generation

AbstractThis article explores the practices of private communication of Muslims at the eclipse of the Russian empire. The correspondence of a young Kazan mullah with his family and friends lays the ground for an analysis of subjectivity at the intersection of literary models and personal experience. In personal writings, individuals selected from a repertoire of available tools for self-fashioning, be that the usage of notebooks, the Russian or Muslim calendar, or peculiarities of situational language use. Letters carried the emotions of their writers as well as evoking emotions in their readers. While still having access to the Persianate models of the self, practiced by previous generations of Tatar students in Bukhara, the new generation prioritized another type of scholarly persona, based on the mastery of Arabic, the study of the Qur’an and the hadith, as well as social activism.

Prince Adam Czartoryski as a liminal figure in the development of modern nationalism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 647-669
Author(s):  
Paul Brykczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.

scholarly journals Exile as Imperial Practice: Western Siberia and the Russian Empire, 1879–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (S26) ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Zhanna Popova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Siberia ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Local Dimension ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Governance Practice ◽  
The Russian Empire

AbstractMore than 800,000 people were exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century. Exile was a complex administrative arrangement that involved differentiated flows of exiles and, in the view of the central authorities, contributed to the colonization of Siberia. This article adopts the “perspective from the colonies” and analyses the local dimension of exile to Siberia. First, it underscores the conflicted nature of the practice by highlighting the agency of the local administrators and the multitude of tensions and negotiations that the maintenance of exile involved. Secondly, by focusing on the example of the penal site of Tobolsk, where exile and imprisonment overlapped, I will elucidate the uneasy relationship between those two penal practices during Russian prison reform. In doing so, I will re-evaluate the position of exile in relation to both penal and governance practice in Imperial Russia.

scholarly journals Nationality Statistics and Russian Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Darius Staliūnas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Common People ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Government ◽  
Russian Politics ◽  
The Russian Empire

In the first half of the nineteenth century the polyethnic nature of the Russian Empire was not a serious problem for its ruling elite. However, ongoing modernization processes and various nationality problems forced the government to pay attention to the ethnic variety of the state. Endeavours to rule the large empire more effectively and certain political reasons led to the taking of nationality censuses. The present paper deals with the causes of the censuses in the Northwest Province of the Russian Empire (in what is now Lithuania and Belarus) in the mid-nineteenth century, with the changes that the gathering of the material underwent and with the use of the collected data for political purposes. Nationality statistics should not be seen merely as an ideological tool. The authorities were in need of nationality statistical data to ensure more effective administration and assessment of the results of their nationality policies. Nevertheless, nationality censuses served ideological aims, too. That was attested by the increasing mistrust of the authorities in statistical data, presented by ‘the Poles’ (mostly by the Catholic clergy). Although Russian ethnographers had placed emphasis on language as a criterion handy for the imperial government in the definition of the nationality of the common people, even in the mid-nineteenth century priority was often given to faith rather than language. That demonstrated how deep-rooted was the equation between faith and nationality in Russian public discourse at that time. Meanwhile as far as the social elite was concerned, national identity was specified by faith, culture, political aspirations and language, too. Although ideologically it was sometimes more convenient to emphasize the Russian or Lithuanian origin of the majority of the gentry, ethno-political reality prevented this from being done with any consistency. Nationality statistics were used in order to ‘prove’ that the region was allegedly not Polish but Russian. Other arguments, largely historical, were used as well.

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

scholarly journals Visual Stereotypes of Tatars in the Finnish Press from the 1880s to the 1910s

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Grand Duchy

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.

Fugitives, Vagrants, and Found Dead Bodies: Identifying the Individual in Tsarist Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-388
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Eye Color ◽  
Physical Measurements ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Identification Practices

AbstractIn the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document