No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. As of now, the corpus of works by early Soviet Marxist historians still represents the most massive and sustained effort to challenge imperial narratives of Russian history from within the Russian academic community. Resonating with current conversations about Russian imperialism and colonialism, this intellectual tradition represents a major contribution to the postcolonial turn in studies of Russian history.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article traite des interprétations historiques marxistes avancées en Union soviétique dans les années 1920 et au début des années 1930, qui cherchaient à reconsidérer l’histoire russe comme un processus dirigé par le capital commercial et qui analysaient l’expansion territoriale russe et son historiographie en termes de colonialisme de peuplement et d’effacement des autochtones. Ce corpus de travaux des premiers historiens marxistes soviétiques représente l’effort le plus important et le plus soutenu à ce jour au sein de la communauté savante russe pour remettre en question les récits impériaux de l’histoire russe. En résonance avec les conversations actuelles sur l’impérialisme et le colonialisme russes, cette tradition intellectuelle représente une contribution majeure au tournant postcolonial dans les études de l’histoire russe.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Marxism
• Mikhail Pokrovskii
• Russian colonization
• settler colonialism
• indigenous erasure

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dmitry Arzyutov, Dmitry Blyshko, David Brandenberger, Pratik Chakrabarti, José Angel Hernández, David McNally, Serguei Oushakine, David Rainbow, Vitalii Tikhonov, participants of the Carolina Russia Seminar at UNC–Chapel Hill, and two anonymous reviewers of Canadian Slavonic Papers as well as its editor, James Krapfl, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions that helped me improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis; Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat; Chernobaev, Professor s pikoi; Artizov, “Shkola M. N. Pokrovskogo.”

2. Artizov, “M. N. Pokrovskii”; Iurganov, Russkoe natsional′noe gosudarstvo, 60. In short, Pokrovskii had to admit that his use of the term “capitalism” for early modern Russia was anachronistic, since commercial capital did not create new relations of production; it was commercial capital (not capitalism) that was at work behind state-building in the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Russian Tsardom.

3. Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 137–41; Artizov, “Shkola M. N. Pokrovskogo,” 140–82; Platt and Brandenberger, Epic Revisionism.

4. Banaji, Brief History. On the reception of Pokrovskii’s works in Russia, see Chernobaev, Professor s pikoi, 201–13.

5. Vdovin, Russkie v XX veke, 56–60.

6. Kokiev, Ocherki po istorii Osetii.

7. Paul, Raibmon, and Johnson, Written as I Remember.

8. Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva. For its early reception, see Halperin, “Early Modern Muscovite State.”

9. Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 237.

10. Ibid., 7.

11. Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, especially chapter 10, “Empire and State,” by Elizabeth Mancke.

12. Pokrovskii, “Vozniknovenie moskovskogo gosudarstva.”

13. Pokrovskii, Russkaia istoria s drevneishikh vremen, 208–59.

14. Pokrovskii, “Vozniknovenie moskovskogo gosudarstva,” 23.

15. Ibid., 26–8.

16. Mininkov, Nikolai Leonardovich Ianchevskii.

17. Ianchevskii, Kolonial′naia politika na Donu; Ianchevskii, Razrushenie legendy o kazachestve.

18. Ianchevskii, Kolonial′naia politika na Donu, 4.

19. Budovnits, Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii.

20. Iurganov, Russkoe natsional′noe gosudarstvo.

21. Miliukov, “Velichie i padenie Pokrovskogo.”

22. Kobrin, Komu ty opasen, istorik?

23. Artizov, “Shkola M. N. Pokrovskogo,” 185–86.

24. Kobrin, Komu ty opasen, istorik? 143.

25. Pokrovskii, “Klassovaia bor′ba i ideologicheskii front,” originally published in 1928 in Pravda.

26. Steven Salaita’s job offer from the University of Illinois was rescinded a month before he was expected to occupy his position over his strong criticism of Israel and its actions during the 2014 Gaza War. Mackey, “Professor’s Angry Tweets.”

27. Quoted in Chernobaev, Professor s pikoi, 23.

28. Vakar, “P. N. Miliukov v izgnanii.”

29. Slocum, “Who, and When”; Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 131.

30. Lenin, “Kak episkop Nikon zashchishchaet.”

31. Ianchevskii, Razrushenie legendy o kazachestve, 15.

32. Ibid., 20.

33. Pokrovskii, “Zavoevanie Kavkaza,” 195.

34. Laruelle, “Alexei Navalny.”

35. Pokrovskii, “Zavoevanie Kavkaza,” 199.

36. Michel Foucault discusses how the relations of domination and power entrench themselves in official historical narratives, which is why counter-hegemonic historical knowledge often has to find refuge in marginal and/or non-narrativized forms. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

37. Ianchevskii, Razrushenie legendy o kazachestve, 20–21.

38. Ibid., 21.

39. Popov, “K istorii natsional′no-burzhuaznogo dvizheniia,” 28–39.

40. Kobrin, Komu ty opasen, istorik? 142.

41. On Pokrovskii’s historical seminars, see Iurganov, Russkoe natsional′noe gosudarstvo, 26.

42. Ganelin, “Stalin i sovetskaia istoriografiia.”

43. Artizov, “Sud′by istorikov shkoly”; “O zadachakh sovetskikh istorikov.”

44. Plokhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 351–53; Amacher, “Mikhail Pokrovskii and Ukraine.”

45. Nechkina, Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki; Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis; David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind.

46. Tikhonov, Istoriki, ideologiia, vlast, 70.

47. David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind, 160–64.

48. Galuzo, Turkestan – koloniia.

49. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 164. In this article, which represents a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, Foucault also mentions that Nietzsche “reproached critical history for detaching us from every real source and for sacrificing the very movement of life to the exclusive concern for truth” (ibid.), a concern that apparently (although without any reference to Nietzsche) drove the later Stalinist critique of Pokrovskii’s school.

50. Pokrovskii, “Vozniknovenie moskovskogo gosudarstva,” 26–28.

51. Ushakin, “Ne vzletevshie samolety mechty,” 14.

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Notes on contributors

Alexey Golubev

Alexey Golubev is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Houston. He is the author of The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press and University of Manitoba Press, 2014, with Irina Takala).