Decolonizing minds in the “Slavic area,” “Slavic area studies,” and beyond

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• imperial principle
• federative principle
• Slavic studies

Russia’s dramatic escalation of its war against Ukraine in February 2022 compelled many people at last to realize that the Russian “Federation” is in fact an empire. Despite hope in the early 1990s that Russian citizens might transform their country into a genuinely democratic federation, conditions were not auspicious, and particularly after Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris El′tsin (Yeltsin) as president in 1999, limited achievements were gradually enervated.¹ If there was any doubt, the imperial nature of the post-Soviet Russian state should have been obvious following Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014 – and it was particularly telling that Putin was reported to have been avidly reading eighteenth-century Russian history just before his little green men appeared on Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula.

The problem, of course, is not just Putin. As Maksym Sviezhentsev and Martin-Oleksandr Kisly argue in their contribution to this forum, “de-occupation” may be achieved militarily, but decolonization is first of all a process of the mind, in which both colonizers and colonized – together with “bystanders” – must recognize and overcome imperialist patterns of thought. While Sviezhentsev and Kisly sharply criticize 240 years of Russian colonial practices in Crimea, they also warn their fellow Ukrainians that they risk reproducing patterns of imperialism if they do not recognize the claims of Crimea’s indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, in the creation of a post-occupation order. Agnieszka Jezyk, in her contribution, likewise points out that interwar Poland – a country freshly reunited and independent after 123 years of partition – harboured a strong movement to imitate one of Poland’s former colonizers (the German Empire) and establish overseas colonies. As far as the bystanders are concerned, Andriy Zayarnyuk has forcefully argued that many Western scholars “enabled” Putin’s aggression against Ukraine by reproducing and normalizing imperialist ways of seeing post-Soviet space.² It is in the hope of decolonizing minds – in Slavic and related area studies, in the areas we study, and beyond – that this forum is offered.

Discussions of decolonization in the Americas have usually not imagined Europe as a space subject to colonialism, since the perspective from beyond Europe’s shores tends to elide the colonial powers of the continent’s western periphery with the continent as a whole. Denis Diderot, however, saw no essential difference between British schemes to settle Germans in America and Catherine II’s policy of settling them in the Volga valley, and similar patterns of resettlement following native displacement had previously characterized Habsburg administration in Hungary and Ottoman rule in Kosovo.³ Influenced by the Annales school or world-systems theory, a variety of scholars from the 1960s to 1980s compared patterns of colonization within Europe with those elsewhere, but with the rise of the globalization “paradigm” in the 1990s, such comparative approaches paradoxically fell to the wayside, even if within Russian studies proponents of the “imperial turn” recognized processes of “internal colonization.”⁴ Explicit discussion of “decolonization” in connection with the “Slavic area” is likewise not new, having first appeared on the pages of Canadian Slavonic Papers in 1968, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, though it did not begin to attract significant scholarly attention until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.⁵ Then as now, peoples resisting or recovering from imperialism were the ones propelling the discussion with their own invocation of an anti-colonial or post-colonial framework. Recognizing the suffering they have experienced, we should be open to the insights to which their perspectives can lead.

Even before the Annales and world-systems theory, Marxism had provided tools for the comparative analysis of imperialism, and in his contribution, Alexey Golubev draws attention to early Soviet historians who endeavoured to reinterpret Russian history as a process of capital accumulation and ensuing social conflict, including colonial expansion and violence against indigenous peoples. Golubev argues that this school, which never recovered from Stalinist repression, remains the most systematic effort to decolonize Russian history from within Russia, and that its work can still inform a globally comparative history of settler colonialism. A potential problem, as both Golubev and Oksana Dudko point out, is that in its materialist vision of historical progress, Marxist analysis has tended not to see inherent value in indigenous knowledge or national liberation. Friedrich Engels, for example, labelled Ukrainians and other subordinate peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy “Völkerabfalle” – ethnic trash – because they resisted the “progressive” forces of Germanization, Magyarization, and Polonization.⁶ The extent to which such a perspective survives, particularly in academic corridors, is a question that Dudko takes up in her article.

An alternative analytical framework can be grounded in the concept of mimetic rivalry, which both Jezyk and Victor Peppard invoke in their contributions. Jezyk observes that Polish dreams of overseas colonies were not motivated primarily by a desire for capital accumulation, but by a desire to rival – and thus be on a par with – Western models that Poles regarded as superior. The trauma of past colonization could be overcome by establishing colonies of Poles’ own, proving that their country was modern, civilized, and “European.” Peppard describes how Russian writers who glorified colonial conquest, such as Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermentov, simultaneously admired and disdained Circassians, emulating aspects of their dress and behaviour while insisting on Russian cultural superiority. Peppard suggests that this mimetic rivalry enabled the colonizers to perpetrate their violence without pangs of conscience. We can see an element of such mimesis in the strands of Ukrainian discourse that Sviezhentsev and Kisly warn would reproduce aspects of Russian colonialism in Crimea.

One’s personal stance toward patterns of imperialism is a subject that Peppard, Victoria Donovan, and Alex Averbuch all consider. Peppard’s primary concern is with teaching, particularly ways instructors can address the imperialism that pervades much of Russian literature and cultural history. Donovan’s focus, by contrast, is research, and she recommends that we adopt collaborative rather than extractivist methods, seeing the people we study not as resources to be mined, but as partners in knowledge co-production. Averbuch examines the dilemmas that Russophone writers in Ukraine must confront in the shadow of Russia’s violence against their country. Averbuch surveyed fifteen authors who are now making Ukrainian their language of creation and fifteen who continue to use Russian. He finds that both groups’ motivations are decolonial: while those who have switched to Ukrainian have done so because they now associate the Russian language with violence, those who continue to write in Russian express a desire to dissociate the language from the aggressor through their creativity. Averbuch proposes that we respond by conceiving of “Ukrainian literature” as a multicultural and multilingual phenomenon.

Donovan and Averbuch, together with Sviezhentsev and Kisly, are gesturing toward a principle of socioepistemological organization that we might call “federative” – and which may be the only principle that can effectively counter the imperial principle. With this term I do not mean formal federations, though they may be one outcome, but rather a pattern of democratic self-organization in which individuals or groups come together and create on a platform of equality. Hannah Arendt identified this principle as the only one that could preserve freedom, by which she meant freedom of action in public space, while Alexis de Tocqueville considered it the only alternative to the imposition of some centralized vision of order, which we may equate with the imperial principle.⁷ It is precisely horizontal, spontaneously federative ties that made Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity possible and that have given Ukrainians strength in the face Russian aggression.⁸ It is also no coincidence that one of the first institutes of Slavic area studies in the West – London’s School of Slavonic & East European Studies – was founded in 1915 as the collaborative effort of refugees from east central and southeastern Europe, in partnership with British sympathizers, to present the perspective of what they called “the small nations of Europe.”⁹ Amid discussions of whether Slavic area studies are themselves a preserve of imperialist thinking, it is useful to remember this century-old, federative impulse. We still need each other.

The crisis of “Slavic” and “European” area studies is Dudko’s central theme, and she questions how helpful or oppressive prevailing categorizations are. As she points out, Ukrainian studies are like an airplane passenger assigned to the seat between “European studies” and “Russian studies” – a seat that happens to be already occupied by “East European studies,” which have not traditionally included Ukraine. How can we make room for everyone at a time when humanities budgets – like aircraft legroom – are shrinking? Dudko proposes shifting the discussion from one about boundaries to one about connections, emphasizing the way Ukraine, for example, has historically not just lain at the boundaries of empires, but linked them. She also suggests that we can foster “pluriversality” by recognizing so-called peripheries as centres in their own right.

This forum is a federative enterprise. Thanks are due to CSP’s editorial board member Katherine Zubovich for suggesting the idea, to the authors for writing and revising under tight deadlines, and to anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on all submissions expeditiously. As always, the opinions presented are the authors’ own, not necessarily those of Canadian Slavonic Papers or the Canadian Association of Slavists. We trust that the forum will contribute to fruitful debate – and perhaps even liberation.

Acknowledgement

For feedback on earlier drafts of this introduction, the author thanks David Aitken, Jessica Rose, Guillaume Sauvé, Matthew Signer, Katherine Zubovich, two anonymous reviewers, and the seven forum contributors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Krapfl

James Krapfl is an associate professor of history at McGill University. He is the author or editor of several works on central and eastern European cultural, political, and intellectual history, including the book Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992, where he contrasts the imperial and federative principles in times of revolutionary reconstitution.

Notes

¹ See Sauvé, Subir la victoire; Urban, Rebirth of Politics; and Gel′man, Authoritarian Russia.

² Zayarnyuk, “Historians as Enablers?”

³ Bartlett, “Diderot and the Foreign.”

⁴ For examples of Annaliste or world-systems comparisons, see, McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier; Hechter, Internal Colonialism; and Verdery, “Internal Colonialism.” On globalization as a paradigm, see Hunt, Writing History. For examples of how Russian colonialism has been discussed within the framework of the “imperial turn,” see Etkind, Internal Colonization; and Hirsch, Empire of Nations.

⁵ Gyorgy, “Competitive Patterns of Nationalism”; Isajiw, “Urban Migration”; Silenieks, “Decolonization and Renewal”; Pavlyshyn, “Post-Colonial Features.”

⁶ Engels, “Der magyarische Kampf.”

⁷ Arendt, On Revolution; Tocqueville, Old Regime.

⁸ Goble, “Ukrainians’ Strong Horizontal Ties”; Kryvda, “Viina i ukraïns′ka kul′tura.”

⁹ Bracewell, “Eastern Europe,” 100.