Imperial knowledge: Russian literature and colonialism 0313313113

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imperial knowledge IMPERIAL The Problem Engendering Empire The Central Asian Narrative in Russian Letters Imperial Desire in the Late Soviet Period NOTES Scholarship and Empire 68 . Deconstructing Empire: Liudmila Petrushevskaia NOTES Selected Bibliography Index About the Author HARDCOVER BAR CODE

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IMPERIAL Knowledge Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of World Literature James Joyce and Trieste Peter Hartshorn True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, editors The Adventure of the Detected Detective: Sherlock Holmes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake William D. Jenkins Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures Edward J. Mullen

The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer, Mary Rohrberger, Stephen Pett, and R.C. Feddersen, editors Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend Jeffrey L. Singman The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children Lillian Corti African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason Helena Woodard Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy David Rigsbee The Image of Manhood in Early Modem Literature: Viewing the Male Andrew P. Williams, editor The Worlding of Jean Rhys Sue Thomas Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism M. Keith Booker

IMPERIAL Knowledge Russian Literature and Colonialism EWA M. THOMPSON Contributions-te the- Study of World Literature, Number 99

Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut • London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Ewa M. (Ewa Majewska), date. Imperial knowledge : Russian literature and colonialism / Ewa M.Thompson. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of world literature, ISSN 07389345 ; no. 99) t Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-31311-3 (alk. paper) 1. Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3.

Imperialism in literature. 4. Nationalism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PG3011.T447 2000 891,709 / 358—dc21 99-045567 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2000 by Ewa M. Thompson All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-045567 ISBN: 0-31331311-3 ISSN: 0738-9345 First published in 2000 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www. greenwood .com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 987654321

Contents Acknowledgments v »

Introduction: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity 1 1. The Problem 15 2. Engendering Empire 53 3. The Consolidating Vision: War and Peace as the New Core Myth of Russian Nationhood 85 4. The Central Asian Narrative in Russian Letters 109 5. Imperial Desire in the Late Soviet Period 129 6. Scholarship and Empire 153 7. Deconstructing Empire: Liudmila Petrushevskaia 199 Selected Bibliography 223 Index 233 *

Acknowledgments Research for this book was supported in part by a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Department of State; by the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California (Discretionary Grant Program, Department of State, Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, Public Law 98-164, Title VIII, 97 Stat. 1047-50); and by Rice University grants for summer research and sabbatical leave. To all these institutions I would like to extend my thankful appreciation. Portions of this book were previously published in Modern Age (“Nationalism, Imperialism, Identity: Second Thoughts,” vol. 40, no. 3, Summer 1998: 250-261), Slavia Orientalis (“Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Colonialist Experience,” vol. 46, no. 4, Fall 1997: 545-555), and Slavic Review (“Nationalist Propaganda in the Soviet Russian Press, 1939-1941,” vol. 50, no. 2, Summer 1991: 385-399) (by permission of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies). Portions of chapters 2, 5, and 6 were previously published in “D. S. Likhachev and the Study of Old Russian Literature,” Russian Literature and Criticism, edited by Evelyn Bristol (Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1982), “N. S. Gumilev and the Russian Ideology,” Nikolai Gumilev, 1996-1989, edited by Sheelagh Graham (Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1987), “Soviet Russian Writers and the Soviet Invasion of Poland in September 1939,” The Search for SelfDefinition in Russian Literature, edited by Ewa M. Thompson (Houston: Rice Univ. Press, 1991), and “V. B. Shklovskii and the Russian Intellectual Tradition,” Aspects of Modern Russian and Czech Literature, edited by Arnold McMillin (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989). Grateful acknowledgments are made to all these journals and publishers. I would also like to thank the following publishers for permission to quote materials published by them: a translation of Razzaq Abdurashidaw's poem in Edward A. Allworth's The Modern Uzbeks: A Cultural History (Hoover Institution Press, 1990); a translation of Adam Acknowledgments viii Mickiewicz's poem in George R. Noyes, editor, Poems by Adam Mickiewicz (Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1944); and materials on Valentin Rasputin from Reconstructing the Canon: Russian Writing in the 1980s, edited by Arnold McMillin and forthcoming from the Overseas Publishers Association, Gordon and Breach Publishers. I am indebted to many colleagues and students who over the years offered support and advice on matters related to the subject matter of this book: Annie Allain, Louis Allain, Arnold Beichman, Michael Bernstam, Aleksandra Z. Boehm, Angela Brintlinger, Steven Clancy,

Olga Cooke, Bogdan Czaykowski, Norman Davies, William B. Edgerton, Herman Ermolaev, John J. Garrard, Zahra Jamal, Igor Lukes, Andrej Kodjak, Alex Kurczaba, Alla Latynina, Andrzej de Lazari, Sidney Monas, Arnold McMillin, Czeslaw Milosz, Ryszard Nycz, Aleksandr M. Panchenko, Beatrice Shube, Richard F. Staar, Lucjan Suchanek, Harry Walsh, Piotr Wilczek. Most of all, I am indebted to my husband, James R. Thompson, for his help and support.

Introduction: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity To introduce the subject of colonialism in Russian literature, a clarification of terminology is in order. This book argues that in contrast to Western colonialism, in which national concerns were often subsumed by those of race and overseas conquest, Russian colonialism leaned heavily on national identity and contiguous expansion. The book further argues that a distinction should be maintained between defensive nationalism, which is poised to defend identity, and aggressive nationalism, which strives to export identity and acquire land on which Others live. Russian nationalism is both aggressive and defensive, and in its aggressive mode it has transformed itself into an imperial appetite for colonial possessions contiguous to ethnic Russia. We may assume that to become a colony of another political and national power, a territory need not sign treaties acknowledging dominion status, as was the case with many British possessions. In the Russian case, territorial conquests were followed by incorporation into Russia or imposition of governments subservient to Russian interests. Russian literature mediated this process by imposing on the conquered territories a narrative of Russian presence that elbowed out native concerns and the native story. Not only Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe have been subjected to Russian colonialism but also Siberia, the Caucasus,

and the Far East. While the collapse of communism brought sovereignty to Russia’s European possessions and to Central Asia, in Siberia, the Caucasus and the Far East there is an increasingly uneasy relationship with Moscow. From the point of view of territory and population, Siberia and the Caucasus are distinct entities, comparable to the “white colonies” of the British, such as Canada or Australia. A devolution of power in Siberia and the Far East need not involve total separation from Moscow, and the book makes no recommendations as to how the process of decentralization should develop. What it tries to show is how Russian writers abetted the power of the center so as to prevent the periphery from speaking in its own 2 Imperial Knowledge voice and conveying its own experience as narrative subject rather than as attachment to the center. The introduction provides a survey of approaches to nationalism in the twentieth century. Chapter 1 attempts to position the problem of Russian colonial self-assertion within the context of textual politics in Russia and abroad. It points out differences between Western and Russian colonialism, and it attempts to show that within the agreedupon conceptual framework of literary scholarship on Russia, Russian colonialism faded from view. The standards, conventions, and expectations of English-language scholarship on Russian literature do not accommodate the aggressive search for selfassertion that is conveyed in Russian literary masterpieces. The subsequent chapters show how Russian writers used their privileged positions as spokespersons for the growing empire to overshadow other discourses, and how they imposed their foremeaning (to use HansGeorg Gadamer’s term) 1 on readers of Russian literature at home and abroad. My goal is to draw attention to that textual victory rather than to write an encyclopedic survey of Russian literature. The final chapter of this book is an attempt to show that a reversal of this centuries-long process may be in sight. While the reversal is minuscule and can easily be suppressed, it is nevertheless real and

confidence inspiring. Naturally, my analysis is not meant to replace earlier stud-, ies but to supplement them: it is not a reduction of meaning but its enrichment that I have tried to bring about. I am aware that no single interpretation can effect a radical change in the structures of attitude and reference regarding Russia. The discursive formation called Russia is an intellectual reality whose metamorphosis will naturally be slow. The English-language readings of Russian literature that turn a blind eye to the problem of Russian colonialism or aggressive nationalism will not disappear overnight, as no compelling political or cultural interests work toward that purpose. Unlike the postcolonial territories of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which have produced numerous personalities and arguments exposing the obverse side of the colonialist medal, the former Russian dominions have produced few such voices. When the Red Army left Central Europe, the liberated countries turned their attention away from Russia, while the former Soviet republics are too busy picking up the pieces of their economies and societies to afford investment in postcolonial discourse. While the Russian Far East has displayed stirrings toward independence, the discursive presence of such happenings is so far minimal. 2 In the Russian Federation in the late 1990s, neither laws nor societal habits nor language itself can easily accommodate anticolonialist voices. The situation still resembles the heyday of Western imperialism, when hardly anyone seriously questioned the domination of one ethnic or territorial group by another. I therefore cannot avail myself, as can postcolonial critics who deal with the West’s colonies, of a plethora of scholarly studies describing the Russian colonial enterprise in Asia and Europe. 3 Nor can I count on a massive recognition of the problem, so alien it may appear to those not used to the idea of treating Russian literary texts as resources and auxiliaries for garnering imperial possessions. While the voices of a George Vernadsky or a Nicholas Riasanovsky have been internalized as representative of early American Introduction

3 discourse on Russian history, a mention of their contemporary, Jan Kucharzewski, is likely to be shrugged off as irrelevant in crafting an image of that history. 4 The study of Russian literature from the standpoint of its colonial context is at an even more elementary stage. So far, virtually all scholars who have made any headway in dealing with Russian colonialism have been political scientists. 5 In 1988, a Ukrainian American scholar, Roman Szporluk, published Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List. 6 There he argued that the intellectuals’ fascination with socialism had elevated Marx to the status of a major thinker, whereas Marx’s contemporary Friedrich List should more appropriately have been so elevated, because his formulations corresponded better to twentiethcentury obsessions than did Marx’s theses about the stateless and nationless proletariat. “Between the individual and humanity stands the nation,” thundered Friedrich List, as he developed the theory of national economic egoism that the Germans and others have so radically implemented. However selective List’s and Szporluk’s suggestions about nationalism may appear, they touch upon problems of continuing importance. Over the last hundred years in Europe and elsewhere, many territorial empires transformed themselves into nation-states under the influence of the idea of nationalism, shedding off their minorities in the process. The minorities themselves formed new states or returned to their earlier sovereign status. 7 The fall of the Soviet Union, fueled as it was by the dual powers of economy and nationalism, has exacerbated ethnic tensions within the fragmenting empire of the Russians. 8 The community of interpretation that existed at American universities in the late 1990s has not treated the national question with the epistemological subtlety so often encountered in the discussions of society and its ills. Within that community, nationhood is largely defined as citizenship. Emile Durkheim formulated a thesis that there is at the basis of social order in any state a set of commonly held

values and norms, and that it accounts for social cohesiveness. This Enlightenment-based interpretation has been widely accepted in academic discourse dealing with such dissimilar political entities as nation-states and empires. Indeed, the English language barely distinguishes between state and nation, or citizenship and nationality. But in Asia, Latin America, and continental Europe it is assumed that nationality has to do with cultural habits and memories of a person, whereas citizenship indicates the civic condition (or choice, in case of naturalization) of being a citizen of this or that political entity. While the two generally coincide, an assumption that they always coincide leads to such amusing statements by American journalists (who take their cues from academic specialists) as that in Chechnya Russians were fighting other Russians, or that twenty million “Russians” died in World War II. Consider the following note, which appeared in the Houston Chronicle on 6 September 1998. Five armed Russian sailors were arrested Saturday, hours after they allegedly killed a guard and seized 47 hostages in a remote northern region, a Russian news agency reported. All the hostages were released unharmed and no hostage-takers were hurt when they were overpowered by special troops of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Interfax reported. The sailors had demanded a plane to take them to the southern Russian region of Dagestan, a troubled area in the Caucasus mountains, according to the report, citing FSB director Vladimir Putin. The hostage crisis apparently stemmed from a suspected car-bomb explosion that killed at least 17 people in the capital of Dagestan on Friday. One of the sailors said a relative may have died in the blast. The others were described as participating out of solidarity. Within the semantics of nationalism current in American academia, the note is unremarkable. A second look, however, reveals the confusion that went into this text—owing to Russian colonial politics, to the way TASS formulates its messages, and to the American editor’s insensitivity to problems of nationalism. The gist of the story,

as gleaned from another source, was as follows. The sailors were stationed on Novaia Zemlia, an Arctic island polluted by nuclear waste to which the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have been dispatching their most intransigent adversaries (it has been rumored that Raoul Wallenberg died on Novaia Zemlia). 9 After a few months of exposure to radiation from nuclear devices and other radioactive debris, the victims are well on their way to painful deaths. The rebellious soldiers on Novaia Zemlia were not Russians but Dagestanis, relatives and neighbors of the rebellious Chechens. Dagestan is inhabited by a non-Slavic Muslim population and by Russian colonial settlers. The Russians conquered Dagestan in the nineteenth century but did not succeed in Russifying the area. Dagestan is one of the territories of the Russian [Rossiiskaia] Federation most likely to secede from it in the foreseeable future. Clashes between the Moscow-installed authorities and Dagestani partisans have been frequent in the 1990s. Several areas in Dagestan tried to join Ichkeriia, or the Chechen Republic. The explosion to which the note refers was part of the armed struggle that the Dagestanis have mounted against Russians and, occasionally, against each other (the Dagestani population is divided into clans, and the conditions of colonial dependency have exacerbated local animosities). The soldiers in question were indeed driven to desperation by the thought of their relatives perishing in an explosion some two thousand miles away, but in registering this message a casual reader is likely to miss the more significant fact that the Russian military had sent members of an ethnic group from southerly (and rebellious) Dagestan to the arctic and healthdestroying nuclear cemetery of Novaia Zemlia. Unaware of these semantic nuances, the American journalist who wrote the note contributed to a misreading in America of Russian discourse and Russian politics. With regard to nationalism, Enlightenment-generated concepts fail to accommodate the distinction between imperialistic nationalism, reaching out aggressively to subjugate and exploit potential colonies, and defensive nationalism, poised to preserve traditions and identities. Within the matrix of “nationalism” tout court > the imperial

powers that controlled much of the world during the last two centuries often appear to be innocent of aggressive appropriations, whereas representatives of the colonized nations (including the mid-sized and small European nations) are assigned blame for the historical processes of which they are merely tail ends. All too often, the two world wars are attributed to the “powder keg” of Eastern Europe rather than to the voracious imperialism of the great European empires. It is standard today to link the French Revolution with nationalism (the Revolution made an appeal to a kingless people, thus invoking nationalist sentiments instead of subject loyalty); 11 still, J. E. E. Dalberg-Acton has traced the rise of modem nationalism to the partitions of Poland, pointing out the pernicious results of “this famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism [which] deprived an entire people of its right to constitute an independent community.” He has put the blame for the rise of nationalism on empires rather than on revolutions, an observation that deserves more credit than it has received. 12 In direct opposition to Acton’s view, Elie Kedourie and E. J. Hobsbawn have argued that the multinational European empires need not have been broken into nation-states, since the “historical consciousness” of the nations they encompassed was far from certifiable. 13 Characteristically, they fail to acknowledge that within these multinational states, one nationality invariably prevailed and forced others into a relationship of colonial dependency. Kedourie’s argument in particular is typically dismissive of all but the best-armed nationalisms of the world. It also is ahistorical, in its invocation of a static historicity of nations, and it tends to exonerate colonialism at the expense of nationalism. Kedourie represents that Western dislike of nonwestem cultural and political identities that, as Leela Gandhi put it, echoes a conviction of an organic inadequacy of nonwestem peoples. 14 Western scholars sometimes look with a disapproving eye at the rising sense of postcolonial nationhood in Asia, Africa, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, implying that selfidentification based on nationality is a kind of shameful disease, of which the guilty party should get rid as soon as possible, unless

possessed of the army and rhetorical wit needed to argue its case worldwide. In Orientalism, Edward Said identifies numerous scholars who argued in this manner. 15 Needless to say, the smaller and struggling nations cannot compete with the hundreds and thousands of books that etch condemnation of their identities onto the memory of the educated in first-world countries. 16 Implicit in such rhetoric is the assumption that while the powerless national groups are culpable by virtue of their separate identities, the taxonomer himself or herself is wonderfully impartial and free of any national attachments whatsoever. Yet as Margaret Canovan has pointed out in a seminal book, The modem liberal democratic ideals depend for the plausibility on the collective power generated by national loyalties that are inconsistent with the ideals themselves. . . . General humanitarian principles and projects presuppose a power base sustained by particular solidarity, while the maintenance of that power base contradicts the very principles it renders plausible.’ 17 In other words, while Western democracies preach and support universalist ideals in the rest of the world, their ability to do so is predicated on attachments to, and preferential treatment of, particular languages and cultures of Western provenance. Professor 6 Imperial Knowledge Canovan argues that this inconsistency has been disregarded or papered over by Western political scientists. In her discussion of nationalism and feminism, Leela Gandhi argues that the Enlightenment-influenced interpretation of nationalism is related to masculinity and manliness, which the proud Europeans were all too eager to deny to those whom they colonized. The British were fond of speaking of effeminate Bengali males, thus rhetorically belittling Bengali nationalism. 18 More broadly, the trivialization of national identity of the colonized peoples has been one of the ways of subjugating them, classifying them as lacking something, as not quite as good as those who wielded power over them, as bearing similarities to the weaker sex, whose destiny was to remain under male tutelage. Within this kind of discourse, small nations were not

entitled to national identity, because being small clashes with that sense of male virility that is part of aggressive nationalism’s selfdefinition. This book is based on the assumption that there are different nationalisms, just as there are different countries, ethnicities, traditions, and histories, and that routinely to use the word in a generic sense serves the ideological interests of those who favor the uprooting of all but the strongest nationalisms of the world. The nationalism of the confident and stable ethnicities that have been beneficiaries of centuries of secure accumulation of wealth is different in its aims and methods from the nationalism of those struggling to survive in a geographical territory whose sovereignty is being contested. The group identity of ethnic elites differs from the identity of the unlettered masses, who share only some elements of the complex mythology that is part of the nationalistic ideal. The manipulative and aggressive nationalisms that strive to colonize others are quite different from the weak, defensive, and reactive nationalisms that easily fall victim to the military and rhetorical appropriation of their adversaries, thus contributing to the situation mentioned earlier—namely, the imposition of “nationalistic guilt” on the politically weak nations while exonerating the power plays initiated by the strong. Colonialism is usually the next stage of aggressive nationalism, and its rooting in traditional male hegemony is too obvious to argue. What is needed is a taxonomy distinguishing between on one hand the efforts to know and cultivate one’s history and idealized traditions, and on the other the efforts at self-assertion through conquest and suppression of other traditions, a self-assertion that characterizes nationalisms that are merely expressions of the hegemonies of unyieldingly male cultures. The fear of essentialism, which acts against the development of a new taxonomy of nationalism, has to be overcome. 19 The functionalists make some useful distinctions but miss the mythology of nationalism. Karl Deutsch strips nationalism of its shared history and memories, treating it as a phenomenon of social exchange. Thus a nation is “a

community of communication” operating in an everlasting present. 20 Benedict Anderson seeks the roots of nationalism in literacy, positing that literacy made possible “imagined communities” that did not exist in earlier times. 21 This is in contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationality theorists, from the German Romantics and the Central European patriots to President Woodrow Wilson. They invoked religion, geography, custom, and history in their discourse. 22 Germany produced many of these theorists (as well as quite a few pathologies of nationalism, from J. G. Fichte to the National Socialists). Adam Mickiewicz and Lajos Kossuth were two Central European voices arguing against the pathologies of nationalism called empires; they advocated nationstates at a time when empires were thriving, colonialism was at its peak, and national self-assertion of small and mid-sized nations seemed irrevocably suppressed in Europe. They were dismissed and excluded from the standard intellectual histones of Europe, even though their mediatory role was huge, and much bloodshed could have been avoided had they been listened to. 23 Adam Mickiewicz’s and Juliusz Slowacki’s writings on Russian colonialism are particularly valuable, but they reside in the archives of Central European thought, which the American community of interpretation has ignored, privileging instead the Russian and German interpretive hegemony. 24 A popular and nonbelligerent formulation of such democratic views appears in the various pronouncements of the United Nations and in publications of such international bodies as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. One such publication holds that a nation is a group of people who share the same history, customs, loyalties, and language (but not necessarily the same blood lines, an important distinction that rightly dissociates nationalism from racism) and that nationalism consists in an awareness of this situation. This view of nationalism assumes that “humanity is naturally divided into nations, which are distinguishable from one another by their historically conditioned traits.” National self-government is thus the natural and legitimate form of government, and the nation-state is the most natural form of organization for human groups. 25 Prominently featured here is a

Wilsonian approach that accepts the identity and continuity of nations. In The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Anthony D. Smith traces the development of modem awareness of national identity to ethnie, or the ethnic community predating modem nations, formed during military ventures and other significant undertakings of a group of people. 26 The ethnie shares a myth-symbol complex (i mythomoteur ). Nations are entities possessed of a common ethnie and a broadly developed mythomoteur . One might add that this mythomoteur may include narratives extolling masculinity and its ways of dealing with the world, such as wars, hunts, and explorations; or it may include feminine ways of self-defense, as for instance the Polish myth of Princess Wanda of Krakow, who was pursued by the German Prince Reitiger and, in order not to betray her identity (a marriage to a German would Germanize Krakow and Poland), committed suicide. After the funeral, her grateful subjects built for her a large mound, which can be seen until this day in the vicinity of Krakow. Wanda belongs to legendary times, and she might never have existed; however, like Princess Olga of Kiev, she became embedded in the Polish mythomoteur, as one of its key elements. National identity tends to congeal into an androgynous form, as in the fatherland/motherland interchange. But while in German culture the masculine element prevails (there is no Mutterland, only Vaterland), in Russian culture one observes a proliferation of concepts that stress the feminine. “Russia” most often enters a discourse as a feminine entity, as matushka Rossiia or rodina. This last word has no equivalent in other European languages, with the possible exception of the German Heimat. Rodina designates a place where one was bom or to which one bears an allegiance that surpasses other allegiances. Interestingly, this feminine aspect of Russian identity has not toned down the aggressiveness of Russian nationalism. As Galina Starovoitova noted, Russian national identity is closely related to territoriality; all conquered land is soon redesignated as Russia. France has its

Marianne, but that is an incomparably weaker concept than the rodina. The formation of the mythological complexes of nations occurred at a time when literacy was a privilege of a few members of the upper classes. At first, only those few were conversant with the history and early formulations of the myth-symbol complex. Its broad distribution in modem societies has undoubtedly been assisted but not determined by mass literacy and technology. The national will-todifference is a form of the will-to-be, and not merely a manifestation of ressentiment, or a futile attempt to confine the world within a single principle that purports to endow it with identity. 27 The collective flavor of each such myth-symbol complex is sui generis, hence the unique experience of feeling oneself part of a certain nation. The futility of forging instant nations, such as the Yugoslav, the Soviet, or the Czecho-Slovak, was due to the absence of a* symbolic complex that members of these fake taxonomical groups might share. The failure of empires to generate loyalty of the colonized peoples stems from an absence, in states created by conquest of the already existing nations, of a common body of memories. David Cannadine, Eric Hobsbawn, and Hugh TrevorRoper have rightly noted that leaders of empires exerted much effort to forge and reinforce such memories. 28 For such a symbolic complex to arise, a large group of people has to have sufficient leisure over long periods of time, and that group has to produce writers who can articulate the national myth in literature. In preindustrial age, the lives of most people were too short and miserable to afford much psychological space for the creation of nations. This is one of the reasons why nationalism is a modem and postmodern phenomenon; why so many new nations have sprung up lately; and why the remaining empires are probably doomed to instability as the “natives” advance in literacy and material wellbeing, generating a literature that mediates and reinforces their experience.

One can distinguish between two types of premodem ethnie, lateral and vertical. The lateral possesses a myth-symbol complex that is aristocratic and intensive, and it develops among members of the upper classes sharing a set of loyalties and memories that in some way contribute to their self-aggrandizement and a sense of mission. The vertical ethnie is one in which a single ethnic culture permeates in varying degrees most strata of the population. The lateral ethnie creates among the masses of people feelings of belonging and continuity, which are the scaffolding of national identity. The complex of myths, memories, and symbols that nations bring into being shapes their constitutive political myth, which in turn weighs heavily on their political culture. 30 Literature is a crucial building block and also an expression of national identity. Attitudes toward victory and defeat vary greatly from nation to nation, based partly on patterns commemorated in literature. Past wars seem to be crucial to the forging of national identity, regardless of whether they were won or lost. The memory of these wars is rhetorically refined by ethnic elites. These reworkings contribute to the lateral and vertical ethnie and thus to the sense of nationhood, but the patterns of behavior that they produce are vastly different. Those ethnic communities that have waged aggressive wars almost continuously throughout their history and that have celebrated victories and defeats with equal vigor (e.g., the Russians), have an exceptionally well-developed senses of nationhood. The German sense of nationhood likewise seems to be traceable to the pugnacious history of the Teutons and their victorious self-assertion in the heart of the European continent. But a great many lost wars seem to have a similarly sustaining effect on nationhood. The Poles lost all wars they fought since the eighteenth century (with the exception of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21), but this continuous chain of national disasters did not make the Polish nationality reconvert itself into ethnicity. The Ukrainian national identity has been greatly strengthened by the memory of the Sovietengineered famine of 1932-33, during which up to ten million Ukrainians lost their lives. In September 1993, the Ukrainian government organized famine celebrations to uplift hearts—

paradoxically, for the celebration was one of defeat The Ukrainian mythological complex is obviously very different from those prevailing in first-world countries. It is still in the process of formation, as Ukrainians regain the self-assurance that their Russian and, earlier, Polish colonial masters tried to take away from them. Defensive nationalism characterizes those memory communities that perceive themselves as being at risk, either because of their smallness (Lithuanians, Georgians, Chechens) or because their expansionist neighbors threaten them. Those affected by it tend to look inward rather than outward, and consequently they fail to develop successful ways of dealing with the outside world. Defensive nationalism is a means of resisting the encroachment of the hostile Other upon one’s identity, yet it is all too often interpreted as xenophobia or antisocial behavior. Such interpretations are themselves manifestations of colonial proclivities, as they force the Other into the Procrustean bed of discursive space staked out by mediators representing major political powers. Expansive nationalism looks outward rather than toward itself and as a result is less aware of its own chauvinism and its colonial desire. Somewhere in that privileged space created by an awareness of present glories and successes in imposing on Others one’s own selfpferception lies a proclivity to taking away the land of Others and establishing there institutions and activities of one’s own. At various times in modem history, nations have been subjected to strictures of colonialism that impeded their development and sapped much of the energy that would otherwise have been spent on society-building activities and on individual cultivation. Colonialism can develop, and has developed, in diverse areas of the world, and its subjects have not been limited to nonwhite non-Europeans. Rapid population growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with the growth of nationalism and added to its vitality. The growth of population density facilitated dissemination of the cdnstitutive political myths and of other myths necessary for the “imagined communities” to arise. The nation-aspeople (as opposed

to the nation-as-empire or nation-as-state) absorbed some religious identities of the past. Lacking the enabling mode of a supportive state, individuals belonging to stateless nations, of whom there were many in the nineteenth century and who continued to clamor for attention at the turn of the twentieth century, dedicated their creative energies to the cultivation and celebration of nationhood in literature and in discursive writing, and sometimes in war. The development of identity requires a measure of societal freedom. Thus representatives of defensive nationalisms spend their resources on resistance to the dominating imperial powers, at the expense of many other activities. The numerous nationalistic risings in nineteenth-century Europe and in the tsarist Russian Empire drained the resources of smaller nations, while their cost to the empires was easily absorbed. This has been well stated by Romuald Traugutt, leader of the 1863 Polish rising against the tsars. Asked why he had joined the rising even though he was a bookish and timid man of a weak physical constitution, Traugutt answered: “God requires virtue of man, and virtue is so much harder to attain in conditions of slavery than in liberty.” Implied in Traugutt’s answer is the thought that in order to attain liberty, one first has to have political sovereignty. This perceived need for freedom makes for an uneasy relationship between postcolonial theory, dependent as it is on Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida s insights into discourse, and the actual struggle of colonial peripheries for self-assertion. The tension is particularly visible in the discourse about the former Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. From Chechnya to Czechoslovakia, the mobilizing power of a call to freedom has prevailed over considerations of race, economy, and discourse. Within the Russian colonial sphere, the struggle was not against the Western ways of knowing or the cultural nationalism of the English or the French but against Russian priorities and Russian “little knowledge.” While postmodernism offered itself as a welcome replacement for Western metaphysics to such postcolonial theorists as Gayatri Spivak, it

offered little to the subaltern peoples of the Soviet bloc. Spivak remarks: When I was first brought up—when I first read Derrida I didn’t know who he was, I was very interested to see that he was actually dismantling the philosophical tradition from inside rather than from outside, because of course we were brought up in an education system in India where the name of the hero of that philosophical system was the universal human being, and we were taught that if we could begin to approach an internationalisation of that human being, then we could be human. 31 Within the context to which Spivak belongs, her remark expresses anger at the universalizing taxonomy of the Enlightenment, which imposed inadequacy on subaltern peoples. But within the Soviet/Russian Empire, this ideological cause of disagreement did not exist; the Western model, however flawed, was not the enemy. At stake was rather the imposition of cultural identity by an empire alien to the perceived defensive identities of the colonized peoples, hence the perceived need for “freedom” from the confining imperial power. Anderson was right in linking nationalism and literacy; nationalism is a byproduct of literacy in the special circumstances of secular society and demographic growth—but it is much more than that. The spread of literacy put the aristocratic ethnie within reach of the lettered masses. What used to be an exclusive tradition of aristocrats became the property of shopkeepers, small farmers, and factory workers. Reinterpretations of that body of memories do, of course, proceed apace in any society, but that process is unlikely to destroy the myths inscribed in literature, social habits, and institutions. The real or imagined heroes of the past, who once inhabited only the memory of the small elites, now inhabit the minds of people for whom family, religion, and political authority used to be the only social realities. They blend with or replace these other loyalties, formatting each individual identity and enabling it to forge its way through the thickets of postmodemity.

As mentioned before, the postcolonial theorists in the West are in disagreement concerning nationalism. Edward Said has argued, albeit somewhat ambivalently, against nationalism’s deceptive charms. However, in The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon treats nationalism as a remedy necessary for curing the disease of colonialism. Elleke Boehmer also grants to nationalists a place in anticolonial struggle. 32 Leela Gandhi makes a case for nationalism as “the only form of political organization which is appropriate for the social and intellectual conditions of the modem world.” She vigorously argues that the antinationalist phobias of first-world thinkers and their readiness to attribute chauvinism to the assertions of nationhood by stateless or empire-dominated nations are echoes of a Hegelian perception of a “lack” characterizing all but the strongest nationalisms of Europe. Hegel considered the Prussian state the pinnacle of historical development in his time, a view containing the germ of the colonial prejudice that postcolonial theory exposes. The colonial and imperial nations characteristically universalize themselves and declare any insurgency against them (such as nationalism) illegitimate, says Gandhi. In doing so, they invoke their own modem societal structures, while suggesting that the insurgency is rural, backward, or uncivilized. Under such circumstances, rhetorical appropriation of a militarily weak enemy is an easy feat. In Gandhi’s view, the paranoid antipathy toward nationalism is a form of retreat tp the set of attitudes and ways of knowing that generated, among others, Orientalism. Thus I would argue that the choice is not between a Volkisch concept of a nation, of the kind the Germans have developed, and the Enlightenment-based citizenship concept. There are other choices. One is tempted to state, somewhat facetiously, that the nationalism of the weak may be human nature s revenge on the postmodern philosophical framework, which denies the possibility of continuity and tends to see past and present as fragmented and discontinuous. While postmodemity trivialized history and colonialism denied the subalterns access to it, nationalism demonstrates that human beings

crave history and that history cannot be engineered out of their consciousnesses. Ignoring nationalism will not make it go away, while understanding it better may contribute to the elimination or weakening of its disorders. More research into the variety of nationalistic experience could help refine and civilize that universal drive for identity and continuity, while at the same time curbing its imperialistic pathology. This book is mostly concerned with that pathology. It does however acknowledge the legitimacy of nationalism as a way of self-assertion and an instrument shaping individual identities in modem and postmodern times. NOTES 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), 238. 2. Paul Goble, “Can Russian Diplomacy Hold Russia Together?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 23 September 1998. 3. One exception is the Hoover Institution Series “Studies of Nationalities in the USSR.” It includes Edward A. Allworth's The Modern Uzbeks (1990), Alan Fisher's The Crimean Tatars (1978), Martha B. Olcott's The Kazakhs (1987), Azade-Ayse Ror-\ lich's The Volga Tatars (1986), Andrejs Plakans' The Latvians (1995), Audrey L. Altstadt's The Azerbaijani Turks (1992), and such related works as Rodger Swearingen's Siberia and the Soviet Far East (1987). Also Hafeez Malik, ed., Central Asia: Its Strategic Importance and Future Prospects (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); and Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998). 4. Jan Kucharzewski, The Origins of Modern Russia (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1948). 5. Uri Ra’anan, Richard Pipes, Helene Carrere-d’Encausse, Alain Besangon.

6. Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). 7. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). 8. Helene Carrere-d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 9. E. M. Thompson, “The Wallenberg Case: The Inferred Soviet Viewpoint,” Raoul Wallenberg in Perspective, edited by K. D. Reiser and Thomas Neumann (Houston: Southwest Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League, 1986), 12-15. 10. Reuters, 20 August 1998. 11. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, 2d ed. (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1967). 12. John E. E. Dalberg-Acton,'“Nationality,” Essays in the History of Liberty, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1986), 413. 13. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1961); E. J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2d rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). 14. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 107-8. Introduction 13 15. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1979) (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 16. Typical in that regard is Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper & Row, 1983) which repeats virtually every negative cliche about Central and

Eastern Europe. J. A. Froude’s opinion that nations have no right to liberty if they do not have enough power to defend it is characteristic of nineteenth-century imperial brutality. Jeffrey Arx, Progress and Pessimism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 205. 17. Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1996), 137. 18. Gandhi, PT. 19. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by C. Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963); Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism (New York: Walker & Co., 1971). 20. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (New York: John Wiley, 1953), 143; and Katherine Verdery, “Ethnicity as Culture: Some SovietAmerican Contrasts,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 15, nos. 1-2 (1988). 21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 22. J. G. Herder’s philosophy of history was fundamental to theorizing about nationalism. J. G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-1791), translated by Frank Manuel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968); C. J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Smith, 1931); Boyd A. Shafer, Faces of Nationalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972); and Salo W. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion (1947) (New York: Meridian, 1960). 23. Louis L. Snyder, The Dynamics of Nationalism: Readings in Its Meaning and Development (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), 229-33. 24. Adam Mickiewicz, “Ksi?gi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego,” Dziela wszystkie, edited by Konrad Gorski (Wroclaw and Warsaw:

Ossolineum, 1969-1972); Juliusz Slowacki, Anhelli, translated by Dorothea Prall Radin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930); Louis Kossuth, “Proclamation of Hungarian Independence,” in Snyder, 232; Eva Haraszti, Kossuth as an English Journalist, translated by Brian McLean (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs distributed by Columbia Univ. Press, 1990). 25. Minority Rights: Problems, Parameters, and Patterns in the CSCE [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe] Context (Washington, DC: CSCE, 1992), 1 - 2 . 26. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 27. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, translated by W. Holdheim (New York: Free Press, 1960); Leszek Kolakowski's'c'ritique of Theodore Adorno in Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, translated by P. S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 358—9 28. In The Invention of Tradition, they argued that nineteenth-century Germany and Great Britain supervised and encouraged the rise of nationalistic rituals of allegedly ancient origin—rituals that they had in fact invented, with a view to raising the prestige of the German and British empires, heightening the emotional attachment to them of their citizens, and making citizens subservient to the empire’s political 14 Imperial Knowledge goals. The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 15^42, 101-164 and 263-308. 29. In 1978, there were 149 nations represented in the United Nations; by 1998, the number had grown to 185. Economist, 19 December 1998.

30. Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 58. 31. Gayatri Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London: Routledge, 1990), 7. 32. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995). 1

The Problem The subject matter of this book is the massive infusion into Russian cultural discourse of Russia’s great-power status. This infusion has been obscured by a lack of intellectual habits of detection. While readers of Western literatures have been sensitized to the literary presence of the mediating techniques of power, no similar process has taken place with regard to Russian letters. When anticolonial consciousness surfaced in the West’s colonies and among Western intellectuals, Russia was excluded from consideration, because Russian imperialism seemed to have been a matter of its precommunist past. The focus of postcolonial discourse was on the West’s former colonies and the help they received from Soviet Russia rather than on tsarist and Soviet engagement in a similar colonial enterprise. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the rejoicing over the fall of an oppressive system took precedence over other considerations, and again the residue of Russian colonialism in Russian letters faded from view. Entire libraries of books and journals inscribed a noncolonial image of Russian culture upon the memories of Western readers. The present book is pitted against this overwhelming authority of texts and testimonies. Several other issues mitigate the perception of Russia as a colonial power. The first is the location of Russia’s colonies. In postcolonial theory and criticism, it is usually assumed that colonies are remote from the metropolis and their conquest requires travel overseas. In the Russian case, they have been contiguous to ethnically Russian lands. The violent transformation of the Russian empire into the Soviet Union further obscured the colonial nature of the Russiandominated state. That state was enlarged ""by a series of wars, annexations, and diplomatic maneuvers that were not unlike the overseas ventures of the Western European powers. But because of the proximity of Russia’s colonies to ethnic Russia, the borderline between the two blurred and screened in Russian and foreign memory the nature of the relationship between metropolis and

periphery. In the 1990s, imperial territories have shrunk to the “Russian” [Rossiiskaia] Federation, which contains various peripheries in search of sovereignty and identity. Related to this territorial ambiguity is a linguistic one. The English words Russia” and “Russian” translate more than a dozen Russian terms and expressions. The Russian language has the word Kossiia, or the Russian nation and state (this word was given prestige by Nikolai Karamzin’s History). The Russian language also has the more ancient word Rus', the state that existed in Kiev before the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. The word Rus' is sometimes used in Russian in a poetic way, to embrace all East Slavs — it may include Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians; in some cases it designates Ukrainians and Belarusians only. In this last case, Rus' echoes the old English word “Ruthenia,” which designates contemporary Belarus and Ukraine taken together but not “Muscovy,” or Russia. Thus, to translate the word Rus’ as “Russia” is fraught with ambiguities, yet this is routinely done by American historians. Then there is the Russian term moskovskoe gosudarstvo, once rendered as “Muscovy” in English.Tt refers to the Moscowcentered state that came into being in the fourteenth century, after the Mongol invasion (the city of Moscow was founded in the twelfth century). This state turned out to be land-greedy in ways in which Kievan Rus had never been, and it continued to absorb its neighbors until its expansion was stopped in 1991; by that time, it was called the USSR. It is important to remember that at first Muscovy did not call itself Rossiia; this term began to be used only in the seventeenth century, coming into official use in the eighteenth. It is also important to remember, as Edward Keenan recently pointed out in a seminal article, that there existed no consciousness in Muscovy of being a continuation of the Kievan state. 1 There is no indication that Ivan the Terrible or his predecessors had ever considered Ukraine or Belarus (then under PolishLithuanian rule) as a Muscovite patrimony. Thus, the notion of “reunification” of the three East Slavic nations advanced by Russian ideologues of the eighteenth century was an

invention of the late seventeenth century, not an integral part of Muscovite perception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Muscovy eventually absorbed Ukraine and Belarus not because it craved reunification (there could have been none, because there had never been any unification), but because it was expanding in all directions. Accordingly, the sixteenth-century Englishman Giles Fletcher was an ambassador to Muscovy and not to Russia, and so he referred to it in his book. Of the Russe Commonwealth (1588). Yet his Muscovy and the later-created rossiiskaia imperiia (the Russian-dominated tsarist empire) are condensed into “Russia” by most twentiethcentury historians of the region. This usage detracts attention from the colonial nature of Muscovy’s acquisitions. While Rus' was not a colonial state, moskovskoe gosudarstvo aspired to be a colonial power, and Rossiia under the tsars, or rossiiskaia imperiia, achieved this goal. The English did not call India “England”; colonies and dominions had names of their own, while the designation “the United Kingdom” acknowledged the identity of the former “internal colonies” of the English crown. In contrast, as Muscovy and its successor state, rossiiskaia imperiia, expanded, such territories as Dagestan, Estonia, Ukraine, or Tatarstan began to be called “Russia,” in defiance of their respective demographic and historical realities. Paraphrasing Keenan, one might say that this linguistic appropriation is one of the great mystifications of European cultural history. The adjective russkii may refer to Rossiia, Rus', or moskovskoe gosudarstvo. In each case the meaning is different. To complicate matters further, in the eighteenth century there came into use the adjective rossiiskii, as a cognate of Rossiia, which was by then an empire. Rossiiskii was occasionally used as a synonym of russkii in ceremonial speech, but Catherine the Great encouraged its use with reference to non-Russian nations of the empire. The word russkii thus referred to Russians, whereas rossiiskii referred to Russians and other subjects of the empire—hence rossiiskaia imperiia or, in

the post-Soviet period, Rossiiskaia Federatsiia. In contemporary Russian, rossiiskii continues to refer to Russians and those nations of the Federation that are not Russian, whereas russkii refers to the Russians alone. Yet both words are translated into English as “Russian.” Since the words have the same etymology, rossiiskii may seem to designate “incomplete” Russians, Russians in the making, persons somehow naturally connected with Russia. The colonial nature of the empire is thus obscured by linguistic manipulation. In Soviet Russia, there were attempts to merge the two by declaring rossiiskii to be an archaic form of russkii. 2 Ivan Bunin’s short story “Aglaia” is one of the many works of literature that facilitate the merging of these cognates in the consciousness of foreign and native readers. A country girl, Katerina, instructs her younger sister in the intricacies of Russian history, which she had learned during a stay at a convent. At the center of that history stands “the grievous tale of how Russia [RMS'] had retreated out of Kiev into impassable forests and morasses, into its little towns of bast, under the cruel rule of the princes of Muscovy; what Russia had endured from sedition, from intercine wars, from ferocious Tatar hordes and from other chastisements of God; from plague and famine, from fire and heavenly portents.” 3 Note the merging of Rus' and Muscovy in this otherwise lovely tale and lamentations over one’s country’s misfortunes, lamentations that might seem excessive in a country as successful as Russia but nonetheless a part of Russian political culture. It should also be noted that the “ferocious Tatar hordes” were part of the Russian empire at the time when the story was written; keeping alive the memory of their past atrocities did not contribute to the Tatars’ welfare as subject people of the Russians. The instability of the meaning of words translated into English as “Russia” and “Russian” facilitates the merging of imperial acquisitiveness and national identity, to use the writer Evgenii Anisimov’s words. Anisimov acknowledged that for the Russians, “the USSR” has usually meant “Russia.” Hearing of the name change of the Soviet Academy of Science (from Soviet to Russian),

its vice president, Evgenii VeiikhoV, responded: “In its essence, it was always the Russian Academy of Science.” 4 Symbolically, the title page of the periodical Nasha Rossiia (no. 11/35, 1992), features the slogan “Rus'-Rossiia-SSSRNasha Velikaia Rodina ” (Rus'Rossiia-USSR-Our Great Homeland). A July 1995 issue of Ogonek (no. 29/4408) contains an editorial written b> Ogonek’s editor in chief. Lev N. Gushchin, using a word that came into being in the eighteenth century, velikorossy. The word contains the adjective great, as in the Soviet national anthem, velikaia Rus', or Great Russia. In Russian it designates a geographical location, but the primary meaning of “great” conveys an aura of importance, especially since its antonym, malorossy (designating Ukrainians and Belarusians), is also used. These semantically manipulative words suggest that Russians are really “Great Russians” and Ukrainians and Belarusians are “little Russians” (the root mal- means “small”). Why are these distinctions important? Because ignoring them is tantamount to concealing how massively Russian colonialism has engaged in de-naming nations and ethnicities. Just as the Irish are not “English” even though they were part of the British Empire, so are the Bashkirs and Dagestanis not “Russian” even though they are part of the “Russian” Federation. With the exception of the Slavic languages, no European tongue distinguishes between russkii and rossiiskii, or between Rus', Rossiia, and moskovskoe gosudarstvo. To avoid the confusion that incomplete translations into English have engendered, I will put “Russian” in quote marks when the original is rossiiskii rather than russkii— thus the “Russian” Federation. The third characteristic that allows Russian colonialism to evade postcolonial taxonomies has to do with the distribution of power and knowledge in metropolis and periphery. In Western colonialism, the metropolis boasted an accumulation of both, and its claim to domination over the periphery was based on thafc fact. The Russian colonial rule was usually based on power alone, rather than on a combination of power and knowledge. The nations of the western

and southwestern rim of the Russian empire perceived themselves as civilizationally superior to the metropolis. Their psychology as conquered peoples was different from that of the colonial subjects of Britain. While the Indians might have regarded the British as adversaries, they reluctantly acknowledged their civilizational competence. The contemporary Czech and Estonian writers, Milan Kundera and Jaan Kross, provide much evidence that under Russian rule, the colonized felt superior to the colonizers. 5 In parts of the Russian and Soviet empires, a unique situation existed where the imperialist was not looked up to by those over whom he exercised authority. The perception of Russian civilizational inferiority was so common in the nineteenth century that even such friends of Russia as Baron August von Haxthausen, who traveled in Russia at Tsar Nicholas I’s expense, stated that “the [Western] countries subdued by Russia possess for the most part a culture which is superior to that of their conqueror.” He had in mind Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland, and Georgia. 6 The obverse side of the medal was Russian ressentiment at not being regarded with due respect by some of the peoples whom the empire had overpowered, a feeling that manifested itself in a particularly harsh treatment of these “Westerners.” The attempts in Russian literature to represent, interpret, belittle, and contain the recalcitrant “Westerners” constitute a special category of hostile treatment of the Other. Dostoevskii incorporated devastating portrayals of Poles in The Brothers Karamazov, while Pushkin and Tiutchev assumed postures of aggrieved superiority. Lesser writers lashed out more directly. In a poem published in Pravda on 18 September 1939, or shortly after the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, the Soviet Russian poet Nikolai Aseev gloated thus over the Polish defeat: “Only crumbs remained of Poland. . . . The Poles did not like our ways; / these gentlemen considered our behavior vulgar.” The conclusion is that now they had got what they deserved. 7

While Western imperialism was partially integrative, Russian imperialism has been markedly centrifugal. The English first imposed their language on the British Isles and then made it the lingua franca of the world. Moscow did not succeed in forging a viable cultural entity out of the territories, nations, and tribes over whom it claimed dominion for generations, in some cases for centuries. Granted, a diverse patchwork of territories was involved, extending from Central Asia to Central Europe, and subject to what Samuel Huntington has called clashes of civilizations. But then, the British Empire was likewise diverse. The lands over which the English exercised power contained hostile civilizations, in the sense in which Huntington uses that word; yet many of them retained the English language even after the colonial period. The Russian language has had no such staying power. While some territories adopted the Russian language but not the Russian nationality (creating a parallel with Ireland), in the 1990s attempts to return to native tongues (as well as dropping the Cyrillic alphabet, introduced by the Soviets) have proceeded apace. It appears that it was not just the size or diversity of the empire that made the metropolitan center ultimately fail in Russification, but also some inherent features of the Russian imperial system. Perhaps Russian imperialism failed because it relied more and longer on soldiers and cannons than had the Western enterprise, and because it did not succeed in replacing cannons with ideas. When it promoted Russian culture, it did so in ways repugnant to the colonized: by a sophomoric insistence on the superiority of Great Russia. Western imperialism offered the native elites a wealth of European intellectual traditions: indeed, postcolonial studies originated simultaneously at Western universities and in subaltern countries. On occasion, voices were raised expressing fears that the metropolis was not safe from the cultural contagion of its own “peripheral” practices; 8 still, certain advantages of the Western epistemological and social systems survived the discrepancies between the lofty ideals advanced at home and the harsh reality of colonial violence abroad. In contrast, Russian imperialism was too self-conscious, too nervous about itself, too manipulative in

promoting Russian culture, and too poor epistemologically to produce ideas and followers in the cultural sphere. While India retained the British democratic system, British education, and quite a bit of the English language, the non-Russians within the Soviet empire tried hard in the 1990s to remove from their homelands all traces of Russianness, so repugnant it seemed to them in its chauvinistic promotion of things Russian. The Russian language, once Spoken throughout the empire, is being replaced by native tongues everywhere except in Belarus. In Ukraine, where a similarity of tongues has caused some confusion, ideological efforts to get rid of the Russian residue were systematically carried out in the 1990s, and they cannot be entirely blamed on Ukrainian chauvinism. In Central Europe, a dramatic drop ot interest in things Russian can be observed. 9 During the Second World Congress of Tatars, held in Kazan' in 1997, the Republic of Tatarstan (an ethnic republic within the “Russian” Federation) adopted the Latin alphabet for the Tatar zu Imperial Knowledge language. 10 This haste to proclaim a linguistic separateness reflects the fact that over the four centuries of subjugation of the Tatar khanates to Russia, Russian and Tatar cultural elites lived separate lives. 11 In Central Asia, the return to Turkic roots has been hampered by economic considerations. The Caucasus has had to struggle against Russian military muscle; however, Georgia and Armenia maintained the primacy of their native tongues over Russian even under communism, and they have successfully defended their non-Cyrillic alphabets. Perhaps the most dramatic diminution of Russian occurred in Lithuania, where the Cyrillic alphabet virtually disappeared from public spaces. In Western Europe and in the United States, a dramatic drop in the study of the Russian language and a concurrent cooling-off of interest in things Russian have also taken place, providing additional proof that a worldwide interest in Russian culture was partly based on a healthy respect for the Soviet armed forces. 12

Edward Said has observed that the integrative power of Western culture made the West and its former colonies congeal into a common cultural sphere, sharing aspirations and perceptions. An opposite process has been taking place in the post-Soviet East. The process of NATO enlargement is perhaps the most eloquent example of the disintegrative power of the Russian and Soviet empires. Few countries have been so eager to join NATO as the nations and states that were part of the Russian sphere of influence. The non-Russian Soviet republics* have similarly aspired to show the world that they are not Russia, that they are different from Russia. As Paul Goble has noted, each consecutive crisis in the Russian Federation seems to draw the former Soviet republics farther and farther apart, making the Commonwealth of Independent States more and more unreal. 3 For these reasons, the two models of nation building outlined by Michael Hechter with regard to the West’s internal colonies do not apply to Russian dominions. The first model envisions a diffusion of power and knowledge from metropolis to periphery; the second posits that in the development of nations, the phenomenon of internal colonialism is all too frequent. 14 The diffusion model assumes that a strong social group attracts others by means of social osmosis, so that its language and cultural habits eventually are adopted by weaker groups. Similarly, the economic habits of stronger groups spread from one locality to another (although the actual workings of this diffusion remain “somewhat mysterious, Hechter admits). Eventually, the division of labor evens out the differences between metropolis and periphery, and there emerges a coherent nation. In contrast, the internal colonialism model holds that metropolitan culture does not easily surrender its superior status, that it tends to exploit the periphery rather than striving for equality. “The dominated society is condemned to an instrumental role by the metropolis.” 15 Neither of these proposals is fully applicable to Russian colonialism. The diffusion model is the one that Russian historiographers have advanced, arguing that peoples and nations joined Russia on a

voluntary basis and congealed into the Rossiiskaia family of peoples. However, upon inspection this turns out to be inaccurate. Not even Georgia (a favorite example of Russian historiographers) wished to join Russia; it negotiated protection from the Turks, not incorporation into the Russian Empire. Solzhenitsyn’s famed saying that [tsarist] “Russia knew no armed separatist movements” and “no [labor] camps” is a fantasy unworthy of a great writer. 16 As was the case with other empires, virtually all nonRussian territories that became part of the tsarist empire and the USSR were acquired by force of arms or by diplomatic pressures that placed smaller nations in no-exit situations. As to the internal colonialism model, it is based on a premise that the metropolis is economically and culturally better developed than the periphery. As explained earlier, this was not true in regard to the western and southwestern rim of the empire. There have been some exceptions to this rule of nonassimilation and coming apart. In northwestern Russia, the Ugro-Finnic population was largely assimilated already in the late nineteenth century, while in the south and the east a certain percentage of the Turkic population was also subsumed within the Russian cultural identity. 17 In Andrei Belyi’s novel St. Petersburg (1916), one of the characters, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, is a Russified and Christianized descendant of a certain mirza from the Kyrgyz steppes, an ancestry to which his surname and appearance abundantly testify. The senator is culturally Russian, notwithstanding an admixture of “Asiatic features” that for Belyi were a secret and omnipresent ingredient of Russian culture. By and large, Russians have practiced an attitude of willing acceptance (mixed with condescension toward nonwhites) when native elites consent to the loss of cultural identity and Russification. Unlike the Asian and African intellectuals, who were conscious of being looked down upon by their colonial masters, the Central and East Europeans in particular were eagerly accepted if they chose to identify, linguistically and culturally, with the Russians. There is no denying of the welcoming attitude with which the Russians have treated

defections from German, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian nationhoods into their own. Not only were those defectors accepted as Russians (something impossible to imagine in nineteenth-century India vis-a-vis the British), but they were accepted with gratitude. Examples include journalist Faddei Bulgarin, Gen. G. K. von Stackelberg, statesman S. Y. Witte, poets Vladislav Khodasevich and Irina Ratushinskaia, writer Nikolai Gogol', and political commentator Otto Latsis. However, throughout the empire’s history, the percentage of the population that did not identify with the Russian metropolis remained steady at about 50 percent. Of the remainder, a certain percentage proclaimed themselves Russians only to get along; when being Russian was no longer to their advantage, they changed their official identity. The subject peoples were too numerous to be Russified quickly, and they were often unwilling to undergo the process; some of them were too remote geographically to submit to easy assimilation. The inordinate territorial appetite of the Russians was also to blame for lack of success in assimilating minorities; -thenyis just so much that a relatively weakly developed culture can absorb and make its own. Most of all, Russian culture lacked a firm philosophical base, which the West so abundantly possessed and which served as an excuse for its “civilizing” conquests. To put it bluntly, the Russians in the nineteenth century accumulated a tremendous amount of what may e metaphorically described as Elgin Marbles, and they produced several writers of genius that placed Russian literature among the most admired literatures in the world; nonetheless, philosophical speculation in Russia was and still is in its infancy, and this fact has a bearing on the perception of Russian culture among subject nations. In the twentieth century, the situation was aggravated by what Leszek Kolakowski has called the magical thinking of Soviet Marxism. 18 Thus Russia lacked the authority that comes from having produced a culture that could win a measure of approval among colonized peoples.

All these subtle relations of power have escaped the attention of many Russia specialists in the West. Western scholars are familiar with Orientalist scholarship that assigned to Western powers a positional superiority over the periphery, assumed to be politically and culturally inferior. By analogy, they have extended the same taxonomy to Russia and its dominions. For instance, in his geopolitical musings George Kennan has repeatedly implied that the subjects of the Russian empire partook of political and cultural inferiority. His opposition to the expansion of NATO into Central Europe—he represented a minority of American politicians, however —was based on these classically Orientalist assumptions. 19 For Kennan, the territory of Central and Eastern Europe was legitimately claimed by Russia for security reasons, an argument strikingly similar to that advanced by the British and French colonialists, for whom the maintenance of colonies was at one time a sine qua non of British or French greatness. In the debate on the enlargement of NATO that took place in 1997 in the United* States, the colonialist attitude of scholars and statesmen who privileged Russian military domination over non-Russian territories and nations played a significant part. With some exceptions, the assumption of the political and cultural centrality of Russia still dominates the American academic discourse on Eastern and Central Europe, and it contributes to the perception on which the “Russia first” policy of much Slavic scholarship in the United States has been based over the past two generations. 20 This is in spite of the fact that the list of those who supported NATO expansion into East Central Europe reads like a Who’s Who of American diplomacy. The privileging of Russia in the publications and policies of such organizations as the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies or the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages can be seen in the tables of contents of their respective journals and the titles of panels at their conferences: in both cases, Russia is treated as if it were the sole object worthy of serious and sustained analysis and commentary. The periphery is perceived as partaking of the intellectual abundance generated by Moscow and St. Petersburg. Russia’s imperial interpretation of itself continues to be accepted in the academic world in spite of the fact that

postcolonial discourse has already substantially changed the selfinterpretation of the Western imperial powers. The cumulative result of keeping Russia’s image frozen, as it were, in its nineteenth-century splendidly imperialistic stage has resulted in taking at face value, without further questioning, the tone of humble innocence that permeates so much of Russian literature, from Gogol' and Dostoevskii to Rasputin and Solzhenitsyn. In contrast, selfconsciousness of colonial wrongdoing is now common in Western discourse. The enabling mode created by Western and native readings of Russian literature conceals colonial exploitation and reinforces in Russian cultural discourse an uncritical self-awareness that is sometimes mistaken for psychological depth. While the vision of national greatness based on colonial hegemony was also articulated in Great Britain, France, and the United States, eventually the balloon of selfcongratulatory attitudes was pierced, and the darker side of oppression and discrimination of the Other was exposed. This has not happened in Russia, either culturally or politically. As Richard Pipes put it in 1997, “A modified Brezhnev doctrine is still in force. Decolonization has been half-hearted.” 21 Peter Ford remarked that “at the heart of Russia’s attitude toward its former colonies is the widely and deeply held view that its empire was a benign influence welcomed by peoples in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.” 22 Unlike Western colonies, which have increasingly talked back to their former masters, Russia’s colonies have by and large remained mute, sometimes lacking Western-educated national elites and always lacking the encouragement of Western academia that foregrounding issues relevant to them would afford. They continue to be perceived within the paradigms relevant to Russia, the objects of Russian perception rather than subjects responding to their own histories, perceptions, and interests. With a high-handedness characteristic of imperialist thinkers, George Kennan continues to refer to “Russians” when commenting on Soviet policy and what the Russian Federation

is likely to do in the future. This way of addressing issues implies that the non-Russians not only do not count but that they should not count. 23 The peoples over whom the hegemony was extended have structured their discourse around the topics of foreign oppression and the struggle against it, rather than heading for that subtler but surer victory afforded by postcolonial discourse and vision. It remains unclear whether the discourse was nipped in the bud by censorship or threats (invariably a powerful factor in Russian cultural politics), or whether recasting the problems of colonialism could not occur, for such reasons as the endemic poverty in Russiandominated territories. The lack of such a discourse has been interpreted in the West according to the rule that if there is no discourse, there is no problem. As postcolonial writers have poignantly shown, a diminution of status invariably awaits those who are represented in writing not by themselves but by others. While the West-oriented subjects of the Russian and Soviet empires have spent their energies resisting Russification and Sovietization, a great deal has been accomplished by Soviets and Russians in stereotyping the images of these recalcitrant subjects in Russianlanguage publications. The distribution of these publications in the West was commensurate with the Soviet empire’s military and political status. A detailed study of this trajectory of stereotypes is yet to be written. In that connection, the perception of postcolonialist commentators that history is “the discourse through which the West has asserted its hegemony over the rest of the world” is incorrect. 24 The world has never been divided into two neat compartments. West and nonWest. The bilateral vision disregards the fact that Russia engaged in a massive effort to manufacture a history, one that stands in partial opposition to the history created by the West on the one hand, and on the other to the history sustained by the efforts of those whom Russia had colonized. In doing so, Russia has successfully superimposed portions of its own narrative on the Western one, either blending the two or including its own voice as a kind

of universally acknowledged commentary or footnote. Entering Western discourse through a side door, as it were, reinforced Russia’s invisibility as a third voice. Russia has sometimes been perceived as a “country cousin” of the West: in this, the dynastic ties of the Romanovs and the Windsors have helped, as have other ties to the West of Russia’s upper crust. In these circumstances, an amalgam of Russian interpretations, references, and characteristics (and the accompanying predispositions, sympathies, and biases) has been internalized by Western writers to such a degree as to make Russia’s aggressive self-assertion nearly invisible. The very fact that the discourse about Russian imperialism has been virtually nonexistent at Western universities, even in postcolonial times, shows the extent of Russia’s rhetorical success. Central and Eastern Europe, Siberia, Central Asia, and area of the Black and Caspian Seas are thus virtually blank spots on the postcolonial map of the world, their geographies and cultures subsumed in the designation of “the Russian Empire,” “the Soviet Union,” “the Soviet bloc,” or “the Russian sphere of influence.” A leading American Sovietologist, Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, is on record as saying that Mikhail Gorbachev engineered the changes in Russia and Eastern Europe, and that Russia should and will eventually reassert itself over the regions it was forced to abandon. 25 The offensive fiction that Russia’s dominions remained under Moscow’s power voluntarily is enshrined in such expressions as “the Warsaw Pact countries,” “the communist countries,” and “Russia and its numerous nationalities.” While “the British Commonwealth” has been deconstructed by postcolonialist scholars, no parallel process regarding Russia has even begun. A certain measure of consent to colonialism among the colonized has also played a role, just as it did in the West’s colonies in the nineteenth century. 26 Unlike the Western colonial powers, which granted members of their titular nationalities political and economic freedoms, Russia gained entry to the circle of European empires while maintaining at home a social system that privileged Russian culture but not the Russian

citizen. In the absence of European-style social freedoms, Russian intellectuals were apt to complain that their status in the empire was no better than that of subaltern peoples. This complaint survived the Soviet era, and it has been eloquently voiced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It exonerates the metropolitan nation from a sense of wrongdoing with regard to the periphery. Ironically, Solzhenitsyn’s own ability to find a large and willing audience in the West has been a function of the empire’s rhetorical and military strength. Many people before him tried to attract the West’s attention to the phenomenon of the Gulag, but they were not equipped with imperial authority and failed to make an impression. 27 The perception of privilege in that regard has entirely escaped Solzhenitsyn and his interpreters, yet it is but a small instance of privileging the metropolis and suppressing the periphery. Within the imperial space, the nervous retouching of the pictures of reality in order to create prestige sometimes assumes comical proportions. The 18 May 1998 issue of Ogonek contained an article about European bison; it tells the reader that bison are relatives of the now-extinct mammoths and that the last bison in the renowned Belovezha National Forest, on the Polish-Belarusian bor der, was killed in 1919. However, the author goes on, this development did not affect the Russian forests, where bison survive in large numbers. The article then details the transfer of bison from forests near the Oka River to others in the Riazan’ region of central Russia. That a periodical of Ogonek’s middlebrow profile would choose to entertain its readers with the story of the bison may seem unremarkable, except that this bit of hegemonic trivia rehearses a classic colonialist situation: the primacy of the metropolitan center over the margin is promoted at the expense of veracity, and in an area that at first sight seems immune to colonialist intervention. The article points to one more failure of the imperial periphery, namely, its inability to maintain its national parks, and to the victory, if only in preserving the bison, of the colonial center. But in fact, the bison of

the Belovezha Forest have been alive and well for generations: in 1980 there were 593 of them, and in 1994, 662. 28 Here is the background to the story. The Belovezha National Forest is one of the rare remnants of Europe’s once-impassable woodlands. Unlike the forests of Riazan’, it has been famous for its bison for centuries. For that reason, having inherited a devastated Belovezha after World War I, the government of the Second Polish Republic replaced the missing bison with those surviving in its zoos, and ever since the bison have been the area’s major attraction. The local rangers guard them with jealous devotion. 29 The Ogonek article implies that as a focus of ecological attention, Belovezha is worthless and Riazan’ the opposite. As is often the case with empires and peripheries, the ability of the imperial center to do things better than the periphery is here encoded in a message that otherwise looks like mere entertainment. As David Cannadine has pointed out, one of the practices of empires has been to encode the empire’s superiority in messages that do not ostensibly deal with political issues, conveying imperial superiority in a subliminal way. The nineteenth-century European empires engaged in such practices on a massive scale. 30 In European colonialist discourse, it was not the bison that served as a prestige builder but flags, parades, schools, bridges, governments, philosophies, and social structures. In the Russian tradition, much of that was unavailable, and substitutes had to be found to represent Russia in domestic and foreign image building. The article about the bison belongs in this context. The version of events supplied by Ogonek is typical of stabilization techniques with regard to the superiority of Russians. Hints and suggestions of that nature, scattered in popular culture, are meant to produce the perception that Russia does things better, while consigning Russia s neighbors to civilizational invisibility. The triviality of the bison issue brings the mechanism of this procedure into focus. Postcolonial theory calls this a terminological appropriation of one culture by another. ' Russia has never been so appropriated by Western powers. Attempts at subsuming Russian within Western discourse were

made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when English travelers and ambassadors to Muscovy wrote of the “rude and barbarous kingdom.” 31 As Muscovy grew in strength and became the Russian Empire, such efforts ceased, and hermeneutics followed military victories. The West has never conquered Russia the way it conquered most of the world. Russia itself turned out to be a conqueror, at first a silent one, one culturally uncertain of itself, and then, as its territories and armies grew by leaps and bounds, an increasingly self-assertive one. Thus, within postcolonial theory an exclusive concentration on concepts of Orient and Occident conceals cultural spaces that the Occident has failed to appropriate. Muscovy was on the verge of such an appropriation, but the empire of Peter and Catherine the Great slipped out of the proprietary definitions imposed by the West on the rest of the world. Russia moved closer to the Occident when it absorbed its western neighbors in 1795. Then came dynastic and other alliances and, finally, a massive satisfaction of colonial desire, as unpolished Muscovy transformed itself into dignified and mysterious Russia. While it would have been unthinkable for Queen Victoria’s kin to marry into an Indian or an African family, the Russian elite were good enough for that purpose, because their skins were white. Catherine the Great was an ethnic German bom in a German principality, but she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and learned to speak Russian, however badly: such a metamorphosis would not have been possible had skin color interfered. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired a place at the European table. Its rulers’ dynastic ties and their publicrelations campaigns defined in a new way its relationship to the Occident. Little by little, Russia began to be inscribed into world history not as a third-worl^ country or part of the remote Orient, toward which an attitude of superiority could be assumed, but rather as a great white power almost on par with Western empires, a power possessed of its own apparatus to measure the Otherness of its nonwhite Asian conquests. Russia’s European conquests were assigned the status of nonproblems. They

were not allowed to tarnish the image of Russia as conceived by Enlightenment writers, such as Voltaire or Catherine the Great herself. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the image of Russia affixed in Western memory was very remote from that of the “rude and barbarous kingdom” once taken for granted by British world travelers. This was a momentous change. When Russia entered Western discourse as an almost equal, its status as a colonial power further slipped from view. Russia’s transformation from a backward Other into an “almost one of us” barely touched Western consciousness, preoccupied as it was with industrial growth and the West’s own colonial expansion. However, the importance of this change was understood by the Russian elites, who feared that the perception of Russia in Europe was precariously balanced between the old image, harking back to the times when the Muscovites were classed together with barbarians, and the new image, which promised and partly delivered full equality with Europe’s best and brightest. The Russian elites acquired an education that superficially followed the European model and, while they constituted less than 1 percent of society, they were its defining voice. As Aleksandr Pushkin said, they all studied this and that, read Adam Smith, and learned enough of the Latin alphabet to write vale at the end of letters. Schools, scholarly societies, theaters, ministries, and other cultural and social institutions imitating Western models were set up in Russia, in a giant effort of will. Some of these institutions, such as the Bolshoi Ballet or the Hermitage Museum, turned out to be remarkably successful in transforming Russia into one-of-us and erasing its image as a non-Westem pol ity. A splendid new literature further redefined Russia and pushed aside its earlier image as an uncouth and unlettered country. Russia’s voice prevailed over the voices of those who were poised to uphold its old image in the West: the disgruntled subaltern peoples perched on Europe’s outskirts; the political dissidents of various ilk, who died in the prisons of Siberia after contributing an appropriate amount of labor to the empire; and occasional travelers like the

marquis de Custine or Joseph de Maistre, who at the end of his stay in St. Petersburg changed his opinions of Russia and found it replete with Potemkin villages. Russian writers rose to the task of crowding out the opposing voices, and the West responded by embracing Russia as a one-of-us and excluding it from the reconceptualizing scrutiny to which other colonial empires were subjected. There have been exceptions, of course. The above-mentioned marquis de Custine’s reminiscences of travels in Russia, published in 1839, attempted to place that country before the Western intellectual gaze. Although the book achieved fame in its time, and there have been attempts to revive it, it failed significantly to influence Western discourse on Russia. 32 Thus, unlike Western empires, Russia has not generated a critical attitude toward the intertextuality that it has created. In conducting the conversation about Russian culture, Russian intellectuals have followed the familiar colonialist route. They consigned to silence cultures that were in some way Russia’s rivals —her colonized neighbors —while successfully resisting the West’s voracious appetite for subsuming the rest of the world within its own cultural language. Russia has maintained a measure of independence in forming its own image in the West, a privilege that other world cultures have generally been denied. Winston Churchill’s famous remark about Russia being a mystery reveals a capitulation before a cultural text that the West has been unable to decipher, an admission that it has been impossible to comprehend the strange alphabet that conceals the Russian story. Russia is therefore allowed to exist in a sphere that an “enlightened” Western discourse describes as an enigma. Such an admission reassures Russia that its self-defined cultural space will not be invaded. It is a sign of surrender. In a remarkably unimperial way, Churchill ceded to the Other the authority to decide who the Other should be. In this case, of course, the Other was an empire rather than a colonized subject. This renunciation of the power to interpret left Russia a free hand to shape its image to its own advantage. The West became so intimidated by Russia’s mysterious Otherness that it did not dare

approach the Russian story with the questions it has asked of itself: what have been the empire’s ways of containing Others? How did the empire conceal its dealings with Others? What in Russia’s history is really a history of the Other? Over the last two centuries, the Russian intellectual elites have assisted the ruling class in inventing rhetorical solutions to the empire’s weaknesses and in concealing the expansionist nature of the Moscow-centered state. Its territory was huge, but its population was not. Russian culture was privileged, but the empire’s peoples were incompletely Russified. From the eighteenth century on, the Russian elites have been engaged in a search for common ground on which all inhabitants of the huge territory could meet. The injection of the empire building vocabulary, such as rossiiskii or velikorossy, into internal Russian discourse was part of that effort. In the meantime, outside the empire’s borders, the Western elites have become convinced that Russian colonialism is a nonissue. The undercurrent of consent to colonialism has been discovered and criticized in the major European literatures, thus providing an additional stimulus for decolonization and creating that healthy dis-ease with which the once-presumptive cultures began to look at themselves. 33 This has not happened in Russia. THE TALE OF RUSSIA’S HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY My study of textual expressions of Russian colonialism was first conceived when I noted an incongruity between the standard interpretations of Russian literature, as taught in the English and Slavic departments of American universities, and Allen F. Chew’s Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders , 34 The Atlas showed a political entity whose geographical and administrative growth was unprecedented in world history. Though seventeenthcentury Muscovy was an obscure and relatively insignificant polity on the borderlands of Europe, the Russian empire, subsequently soldered into the Soviet Union, became a world power, in addition to claiming the title of the largest country in the world. The

fateful story of innumerable wars, occupations, treaties, annexations, declarations, and infrequent retreats makes for fascinatin| reading as the image emerges of Russia’s acquisition of territory village after village, town after town, river after river, steppe after steppe. The momentous political transformations that the Russians have initiated, and by which they themselves were transformed, affected men and women of various ethnicities and creeds. The attitudes and actions of the subjects of that empire were circumscribed by the places they occupied in the imperial order. Russian literature played a mediating role in this process. The charming heroes of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, Pushkin and Lermontov, Turgenev and Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn and Rybakov are part and parcel of the Russian colonial project. The story that Professor Chew’s Atlas adumbrates is one of a massive and costly expansion eastward and westward, northward and southward. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the empire expanded at the average rate of fifty-five square miles a day. This rate of expansion guaranteed that the annexed territories would not be fully Russified, thus making the empire perpetually unstable. Over the period of two centuries prior to 1914, Rossiia expanded at the cost of an uncommonly large fraction of its gross domestic product. In 1720, Peter the Great disbursed 96 percent of state revenues on the army. In the eighteenth century, every hundred inhabitants of the Russian-dominated state supported three soldiers, whereas in Western Europe a comparable number of citizens were burdened with the expenses of only one soldier. 35 In the nineteenth century, Russia consolidated its grip on the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and on the Caucasus, while at the same time engaging in the “Great Game” over the spoils of Asia. Russia’s military ventures were successful, but the maintenance of a disproportionately large army modified Russia’s social life and its cultural discourse in crucial ways. The narrator in Lev Tolstoi s story The Cossacks” (1862) mentions in passing that on a number of oc casions, entire Cossack villages were resettled in the Caucasus to keep the native populations in check and to provide bases for further conquests. Similar population relocations occurred around the Black

Sea, in the Baltic area, and in Siberia. The economic sacrifices that the Russians bore were the obverse of Russia’s colonial effort, and they were reflected in the tone of victimhood that so often appears in Russian literature. The contiguous expansion of Russia precipitated the unending brutalities to which both the conquered and the conquerors were exposed. These brutalities became enshrined in the empire’s social and political memory, and in its geographical taxonomy. Suffice it to mention that for centuries the word “Siberia” was associated with forced labor camps. Furthermore, Russia’s voracious territorial appetite created a land glut in the empire, in the Soviet Union, and in postSoviet Russia. Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned [Podniataia tselina ] (1931) mediated the ideological issues related to excess land in conditions of Soviet power. In the tsarist empire, the size of the land surplus made assimilation and the rule of law practically impossible. An awareness of this land surplus has grown progressively in Russian literature, and it has generated novelistic plots and interpretations of geography (e.g, Dostoevskii’s use of Siberia as a place of punishment, cleansing, and opportunity). It may be responsible for that part of the Russian identity that sees Rossiia as too vast and diverse to be administered in a “rational” fashion. Rossiia thus becomes a mystical entity, bound by fate to remain edinaia i nedelimaia (one and indivisible). On the other hand, Rossiia' s vastness has also been blamed for the notorious inability of Empire to achieve for its citizens a standard of living comparable to that prevailing in European empires. For much of Rossiia' s history, frontier conditions prevailed from the suburbs of Moscow to Vladivostok. In standard readings of the great works of Russian literature, there is little awareness of these issues. The experience of characters in that literature is viewed in terms of general human experience, with the element of imperialism neatly blotted out. In interpreting Russian literary texts as essentially free of involvement with Russia’s military posture, Russian and Western commentators have yielded to these texts’ spectacular ability to avoid the gaze of a critic capable of

highlighting their services to the empire. Russian literature has been spectacularly successful in conducting, fostering and managing a discourse about itself in such a way as to avoid the stringent inspection that postcolonial critics have imposed on British, French, and other Western literatures. I call such readings Kafkaesque, in that they ignore the connection between Russian literature and the Russian empire and instead place characters in a kind of noman’s land, not unlike that in which Kafka’s heroes live. At first glance, the distinctly Russian decor of the great Russian novels makes them very different from Kafka’s colorless and nameless place of action. They do, however, share with Kafka’s works that existential innocence and helplessness that makes the interpretation center on fate rather than on the space between Power and its reluctant subjects. One hopes for a discourse on how Russian writers structured their consent to, or disagreement with, Russian imperialism, how they rhetorically appropriated the lands of the empire, and ascribed to the Others the characteristics suitable to the Others’ position in the order of things. In contrast to Chew’s Atlas, the Russian historians whose books have shaped the American vision of Russia have focused their narratives not on the problems of conquest and aggression but on the price that ordinary Russians have paid for the conquest. Some of these historians have bought into the idea that Russia has suffered in an unprecedented fashion from foreign invasions and that these invasions have been an unfortunate constant of Russian history. The invasion myth has shaped the Russian vision of life and Russian political behavior, and it also has been brought to bear on Western interpretations. 36 The image of victimhood has become so strongly associated with the perception of Russia in the Englishspeaking world that to dislodge it appears almost impossible. It is perpetuated by books and voices dispersed over various disciplines and spaces. While Russia’s territorial growth is taken for granted, almost as if it were bound to occur, a reverse process is interpreted as a disaster of major proportions.

In contrast to the images of hurt and grievance, the Atlas shows that the Russian heartland, the Tulas and the Riazan's, the Kostromas and the Vologdas, has not been invaded since the early Middle Ages. Instead, it was the Russians who repeatedly mobilized to appropriate principalities where other national groups lived, establishing military settlements in areas that were dubbed “Russian” as soon as the first Russian garrison was set up there. More than any other book, the Atlas puts to rest the myth of the invasions. It points out that ethnic Russia, remained virtually free of foreign occupation after the formation of the Muscovite state; the short-lived Polish and French incursions of 1610 and 1812, respectively, amounted to a narrow column of soldiers crossing vast territories on their way to the city of Moscow, while countless Russian villages and towns continued to conduct their business in age-old ways, never seeing a foreign soldier in their midst and never paying taxes benefiting the occupier. In the early nineteenth century, the average speed of a man on horseback was about thirteen miles per hour. 37 The Polish raid on Moscow and the French attempt to overpower Russia were carried out along a route whose width seldom exceeded fifty miles. The German invasion of 1941, while disastrous in many ways for Russians and non-Russians alike, destroyed mostly the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus. As Norman Davies’s famous comment about the alleged twenty million Russian war dead goes, they were neither Russians, nor twenty million, nor war dead. 38 That does not mean that Russia did not suffer in World War II; it did, and terribly. It also suffered during the Napoleonic invasion, less so during the Polish one. But let us again look at the Atlas, as it outlines World War II in the Soviet Union. By comparison to other nations and ethnicities, which were taken over entirely by the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the Russians in World War II were able to withdraw vast numbers of people and valuable industrial facilities beyond the Urals, where they survived the war virtually intact. Russian scientists did not have to worry about living with the enemy. Within Russia proper, the Germans stopped at Voronezh, which is some 1,800 miles away from Novosibirsk, and they never set foot in Moscow. Although

besieged to the point of exhaustion, Leningrad and its architectural and artistic riches likewise remained in Russian hands. Compare this with a total destruction of the major and minor cities of Eastern and Central Europe crisscrossed by foreign armies plundering, killing civilians, and setting fires after devastation by artillery, bombs, and firearms. While the losses during the siege of Leningrad were dramatic, the percentage of the ethnic Russian population lost was significantly smaller than that of the neighboring ethnic groups. The self-inflicted losses caused by the Gulag to which Norman Davies alludes should also be taken into account. The wealth of Leningrad’s museums did not decrease during World War II, what with the war bounty eventually brought there from Germany and other countries, a bounty that remained in Russian hands even after the implosion of the Soviet Union. 39 The Germans occupied some 5 percent of the Rossiiskaia Federation for a period of less than three years. In contrast, the war lasted six years for Russia’s western neighbors. In Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a medical student, Zoia, and her family survive the war by relocating from Smolensk to Tashkent. Zoia takes this one-directional flow of Russians fleeing from danger for granted as she reflects, in a conversation with Kostoglotov, on the vast size of “their” country. 40 Yet the post-World War II Russian literature has reinforced the perception of an unprecedented victimhood, and, with few exceptions, Western scholars have unquestioningly accepted it. POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES ON RUSSIA While the story told by Professor Chew’s Atlas provided a stimulus to take a look at Russian literature from the standpoint of the Russian colonial experience, a methodology to undertake such a study materialized only with the rise of postcolonial theory. Western studies probing the relationship between European colonial powers and subjugated territories in Asia and Africa provide models and insights for my study of Russian letters. Foremost among them are Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism (1994).

Orientalism gave to postcolonial theory and postcolonial studies an impetus and legitimacy that they had not previously enjoyed. At the outset, Said experienced difficulties in securing a publisher, so alien the book’s discourse seemed to those conversant with the standard approaches of Western writings on nonwestern subjects. However, when Orientalism appeared in print, a majority of reviewers responded enthusiastically, and the book found a large audience. Said created a model for a discourse that subsequently grew into hundreds of books. The disintegration of Western empires and a growing consciousness of the illegitimacy of imposing one’s own discourse on the belittled and demonized Other placed Said’s work in or near the center of vital issues in academia. Orientalism reinterprets a concept forged by the “imperial” writers of the nineteenth century to contain textually the “lesser races” brought into servitude by the force of arms during the European scramble for colonies. In its original usage, the term designated a corpus of writings about Asia and Africa by ethnographers, anthropologists, historians, and travelers who collectively analyzed and “contained” nonwestern peoples within what they considered to be the Western way of knowing, or within the Enlightenment methodology of historical studies. Said argued that the Orientalist vision was distorted from the very beginning by the taxonomers’ outsider position and by the fact that their scholarship was not neutral vis-avis the interests of the empires of which they were the empowered representatives. Their position as the sole articulators of the meaning of non western cultures—the “natives” did not talk back to Empires at that time—gave them unrestricted freedom in classifying others. It also allowed them to construct static categories, of which “the Orient” itself is an example. As conceived by the Orientalists, the Orient was an unchangeable entity and its inhabitants could only be evaluated en masse; as individuals, they were mere illustrations of some “typically Oriental” characteristic. Thus the nonwestern peoples became prisoners of evaluative interpretations deemed valid in changing circumstances.

They were subjected to generalizations that they could not dispute and of which they were not even aware: the Orientalist discourse was a discourse of Westerners with Westerners, and the idea that “the Orient” might want to avail itself of the premodern legal admonition audiatur et altera pars (let us listen to the other side) did not arise for the Orientalists. One did not debate issues with the Orient; one debated them only within one’s own circle. Western anthropology, linguistics, and Darwinian biology reinforced the taxonomical captivity of Others and made them unable to break out of the prison house of Orientalist categories. The Orientalist interpretation created a cage in which the non western peoples became, seemingly irrevocably, confined. It was a well-argued cage, and the theses that put it together were nearly seamless. Principles of thinking grounded in the Enlightenment vouched for its validity foi* the foreseeable future. Deconstructing that cage by taking on individual books rather than the category itself would have been a gargantuan task; Said opted for a holistic approach oriented toward the cage, so to speak, rather than toward its numerous parts and elements. In doing so, he began the process of deconstruction of the Enlightenment-generated discourse of power masquerading as disinterested scholarship. Among Said’s greatest achievements is to foreground the influence that a community of interpretation exerts over the subject it interprets. While Said dealt with the French and English Orientalists, his characteristically relaxed (i.e., displaying only a negligible admixture of ressentiment ) musings are relevant to a multitude of other situations. As posited earlier, English-language interpretations of Russian culture have profited from the imperial sympathies of scholars who bestowed on the Russian colonial adventure the same compliments that the Orientalists once paid to Western conquerors. To put it bluntly, Said has cleared the road that scholars dealing with Russian history and culture must travel sooner or later—the sooner the better, in my view.

The next step was made by Culture and Imperialism. Here Said furnished the starkly repetitive definition of imperialism: At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land thar you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others.... As I shall be using the term, “imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; “colonialism,” which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As Michael Doyle puts it: “Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.” 41 Culture and Imperialism examines English and French writers and cultural figures who can by no means be called jingoists, who articulated the imperial vision in all its presumed innocence. Joseph Conrad spoke with a forked tongue: while presenting Africa and Asia “from the outside,” he managed to distance himself from the imposed hierarchies of imperial rule. Similarly, Jane Austen touched lightly on the realities of having possessions overseas, and she was unsparing in moral judgments on the characters’ behavior back home. Said rightfully acknowledges Conrad’s irony and skepticism concerning England’s imperial conquests, and he is well aware of Austen’s “moral discriminations.” 42 While Walter Lippmann and George Kennan nurtured a profound sense of American superiority, they both despised primitive chauvinism, he contends. However, as articulators of American destiny, they are shown to reflect that readiness to impose interpretations on powerless nations that characterizes imperial thinkers. 43 Similarly, for all their ambivalence, Conrad and Austen remain imperial spokespersons. Said provides a radical rereading of these writers, and of many others. With very few exceptions, the Russian imperial discourse has not produced such nuanced and self-critical texts. The imperial

consciousness in Russia has generally been untouched by a realization that succes (if not noblesse) oblige. Not a single Russian writer of note has questioned the necessity or wisdom of using the nation’s resources to subjugate more and more territory for the empire or to hold on to territories that are not Russian, or even Slavic. Not one has questioned the moral ambiguities of colonial violence. The ease with which the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century glided over the realities of the wars that their government was waging finds no parallel in Western European countries. Neither Russian writers nor Russian intellectuals have ever adumbrated the reality of imperial politics in the conquered territories. The notion of reparations, should it ever be articulated by a Russian intellectual, would probably (initially at least) endanger that intellectual’s life and limb. The idea of colonial dependency and its cost to the conquered nations has not penetrated the Russian national discourse. While many Russian writers have excelled in moral discriminations, they have written only from the inside of their imperial house, like Britons who agonized over the just spending at home of income derived from overseas slave labor. There is much compassion in Russian literature for the Akakii Akakieviches or, more recently, for the Ivan Denisoviches and Andrei Gus'kovs, but no awareness whatever that these miserable characters were still beneficiaries of the Imperiupi, in ways similar to those in which the hapless Mr. Micawber was such a beneficiary. 44 Dostoevskii never perceived the irony of writing novels about moral dilemmas while his readers engaged in violence abroad. Given the absence of an awareness of colonial misdeeds, the Russian discourse can hardly be expected to take kindly to Culture and Imperialism or to accommodate itself to its insights without protests. There is another difficulty. The category of Orientalism that Said reshaped and reinterpreted engendered a variety of studies that make sense on the level of abstraction barely accessible to those who like to have their concepts in plain view. Postcolonial theory draws on numerous

postmodern philosophical and psychological sources, and this heritage accounts for some of the resistance to it among the more traditional Russian writers. With the exception of the formalist and structuralist episode (never fully integrated into the critical mainstream), literary criticism in Russia has seldom attracted novel ideas, preferring rather to draw from well-established models. 45 Also, some intellectuals have refused to move beyond the idea that totalitarian oppression affected Russians and nonRussians alike under communism. While the cluster of issues related to Soviet totalitarianism is a valid one, in literary studies it has to be subsumed within the broader textuality that postcolonial theory has uncovered, if only because literary studies deal with texts rather than directly with the world. The absence of discourse revealing the intermediary role of Russian literature in protecting Russian imperial interests seems to parallel the nineteenth-century Western discourse about the Orient. In that connection, the heritage of socialist realism is an important factor in fostering resistance to an awareness of Russian colonial expansion and violence. For two generations after the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932, socialist realism was the obligatory method of imaginative writing in Russia. The exceptions were few and far between, and they did not have a wide enough, circulation in samizdat to make a difference in the usage of language and the ways of knowing internalized in Russian culture. As argued in chapter 5, the prescriptive norms of socialist realism affected the range of subjects that Russian writers addressed and the vocabulary they used. They also affected discourse in such a way as to make postcolonial critical categories difficult to assimilate. In spite of all the disclaimers, modifications, and updatings that occurred since Stalin’s death, socialist realism was a straightjacket in which the Russian language, and therefore Russian thinking, was confined by thousands of writers, speakers, and journalists. Under their leadership, whole areas of human experience disappeared from language, and therefore from consciousness and culture.

The vocabulary of Russian writers and critics is amazingly simple, not to say primitive, in matters pertaining of national loyalty and to the perception of Russians by non-Russians within the empire. Any kind of reflection on the whys of such issues, indeed any epistemological reflection at all, is generally absent. Through their songs, film scripts, novels, poems, plays, and articles, Soviet Russian writers inscribed in the Russian language a crudely sentimental vision of Russians and their loyalties. With very few exceptions, Russian intellectuals applied a stabilizing solution to this simplistic version of reality. Russian political figures rehearsed this version of reality in speeches and pronouncements, replenishing its prestige and authority. As a result, a Russian reader today is bom into a linguistic and literary scene strewn with state-extolling myths, and the Russian writers’ notion of national duty remains couched in territorial and colonialist terms. The Russian language is now at a stage where it excludes, organically rejects, as it were, concepts and ideas incompatible with the love of rodina and otechestvo (fatherland) understood as the prime value to which a good Russian owes his or her unquestioned allegiance. The Village Writers of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia have drawn on this linguistic and conceptual material, creating heroes who might have been conceived by eighteenth-century didactic fabulators, who likewise extolled Russia and its magic appeal. In literary discussions, members of the Russian intelligentsia still hold on to the idea that Russia is a country where freedom can be achieved without the framework of the legalistic institutions developed by the West. 46 The Russians, said a post-Soviet intellectual, C. C. Averintsev, “do not trust that freedom which is guaranteed by institutions”; 47 V. Ushakov assured his readers that Russia is impervious to any attempts to understand it through a rational analysis. 48 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Literaturnaia gazeta and Ogonek (and at the other end of the political spectrum, Literaturnaia Rossiia ) conducted lengthy discussions about Russian identity. A spate of books dealing with the issue also appeared. The discussions were generally kept within the parameters of terminology made acceptable by socialist realism 49

Much has been written about the inconsistencies of Orientalism and its inability to follow, let alone create, an all-embracing methodology of postcolonial study. 50 It should be remembered, however, that creating an area of study is always intuitive and adumbrative; methodologies come second. Said has repeatedly said that he eschewes the essentialist point of view, but in his argument he sometimes comes surprisingly close to it. He treats the French Orientalists much more indulgently than the English, and his structuring of the Orientalist category carries essentialist overtones. Perhaps this means that some form of essentialism cannot be avoided in works that are truly seminal. Said is not fixated on the power-powerlessness relation between national groups. In the afterword to Orientalism, written in 1994, he proposed a way out of the morass of the power paradigm: that we all struggle to detach ourselves from concerns that help generate imperialism, and that we structure our responses to fellow human beings in such a way that the elements of race, nation, and social standing become inconsequential, while cultures are absorbed and traded freely through a hybrid education provided by migrant intellectuals in the postindustrial world. This may be utopian, but it nevertheless deserves discussion. As Margaret Canovan has observed, Western democracies maintain nondiscriminatory laws within their borders, but they have closed these borders to immigrants from third-world countries. Thus the maintenance of nondiscriminatory laws regarding ethnic background or race is predicated upon discrimination based on ethnic background or race. 51 Within the closed borders, of course, nondiscrimination is enshrined in the laws of Western democracies, but putting it into practice still takes personal effort. Significantly, in Culture and Imperialism Said invokes a medieval Christian methodology of such a struggle, thus again rubbing shoulders with the essentialism that he elsewhere repudiates. He quotes a twelfth-century monk who counsels those in search of perfection to abandon the self-love that manifests itself as the love of one’s native land. Those who love only the actual neighbor are on their way to perfection, counsels the monk, but those for whom the entire earth is a native land and every

human being is a neighbor—these are truly perfect. Repudiating the Enlightenment mentality that generated Orientalism in the first place, Said is more in tune with that 36 Imperial Knowledge earlier, pre-Cartesian rationality, which has traveled through Western history as an undercurrent all the way to postmodern times. Culture and Imperialism is written in a provocative style, and its contribution to theory is even less pronounced than that of Orientalism. Said extends his enquiry beyond literature, to Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida and to American writings on minorities. He finds here a hidden layer of colonialist assumptions and of paternalistic superciliousness. His single-handed attempt to change the fundamental orientation of American literary criticism, indeed of the American way of viewing the Other, is formidable in its scope. Many critical categories that are now standard in postcolonial discourse originated with Said. Among postcolonial authors who followed in the wake of Orientalism, one can distinguish those who take into account the factor of nationhood and those who do not. However, the myths and symbols accompanying nationhood and the aggressive wars that led to colonial conquests are noted in postcolonial writings only insofar as they enable the writer to make a clearer distinction between “us” and “them,” or between the colonizer and the colonized. There is little emphasis on the constitutive elements of a nation, an indication of a possible exhaustion of nationalist interest among the secure nationhoods of Western Europe and among such numerically large ones as India or Pakistan (the majority of postcolonial theorists and critics have come from these two directions). It is race rather than % nationhood that interests the postcolonial writers: a kind of racism a rebours. In that regard, studies of Russian colonialism differ, for it is nationhood rather than race that plays the key role in the formation of the Russian imperial mentality. In the course of their expansion, Russians often encountered cohesive nations rather than tribal organizations, and hence anticolonial struggle within the Russian

empire has often taken the form of a national struggle. The Marxistgenerated anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa took a dim view of national cohesiveness, because nationhood is not a category Marxism pays much attention to, and because in the Soviet period the Russian state supported anticolonialist Marxists financially and militarily. It was therefore convenient for Marxist anticolonialists to ignore the fact that Russia as a nation was deeply engaged in this enterprise that it ostentatiously repudiated outside its sphere of influence. The fact that the major contributors to postcolonial theory (as it is constituted at American and British universities) are Asians, Africans, West Indians or in Said’s case, Arabs, carries its own measure of poetic justice. Particularly with regard to India and Pakistan, the empire has talked back so forcefully that it has inserted itself irreversibly in the metropolitan discourse, changing it beyond recognition. To give the center its due, its hospitality toward a critique of itself points to some of the enduring features of the intellectual paradigm generated by European culture. Permitting Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha to shape Western academic responses to Western imperialism amounts to inviting, say, Poles or Lithuanians to instruct students at Russian universities about Russian imperialism. The inconceivability of such a project gauges the distance between the relative openness of Western discourse and the continuing selfimposed suppression of discourse in the “Russian” Federation. It also suggests a presence of yet-unnamed factors in Russian culture that prevent it from engaging in this kind of counterpoint. The refusal of Russian intellectuals to discuss issues of colonialism indicates a lack of a capacity in the Russian tradition for tolerance and experimentation. In Russian literary journals, postcommunist debates about Russian history take on the tired Westemer-Slavophile controversy rather than the interaction of Russians with Others. 52 Another matter of poetic justice has to do with the conceptual apparatus that postcolomal discourse has produced. The diverse

cultural backgrounds of the major postcolonial critics have enabled them to create a corpus of academic writings whose conceptual roots go far beyond the queen’s English. They stretch the limits of the English language, and sometimes almost do violence to it, by compelling it to embrace concepts alien to its fundamental structures. This process was, of course, initiated by Jacques Derrida; in his conscious effort to destroy Western ontology, he resorted to such strategies as striking through words that had to be used even though their meanings had been “invalidated.” Postcolonial critics likewise change the semantics of words and phrases and the English syntax, and they avail themselves of neologisms and puns. In fact, punning has become the mark of a postmodern critic. Unusual or unexpected word connections are now as acceptable in titles of papers and lectures as invocations of the canon used to be a generation ago. Critics seem to enjoy diverting words from their customary dictionary slots into spaces not previously occupied. Consider Homi Bhabha’s essay “DissemiNation”; or the feminist/postcolonialist use of the noun “world” as a verb, as in “worlding the third-world woman;” 53 or such titles of volumes as ReSiting Queen’s English. 54 Such strategies have been consciously adopted, and postcolonial critics have theorized about them. The authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989) name two fundamental strategies essential to an adaptation of English to experiences and insights coming from different cultural traditions: the first is abrogation and the second, appropriation. Abrogation is described as a “refusal of the categories of the imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or ‘correct’ usage, and its assumption of a traditional affixed meaning ‘inscribed’ in the words.” Appropriation is “the process by which the language is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience.” 55 Within the former British Empire, this postcolonial language is then called “english,” to distinguish it from the queen’s English which is the currency of the former colonizers. What emerges is a syncretic usage, an overlaying of the syntactic and grammatical rules of one language, or languages, over another. Some critics speculate that this syncretic “english” sprang forth

because of the preference of nonwestern writers for metonymy as opposed to metaphor, the latter being a quintessentially Western trope. If one reads the gropes of the text as metonymies, one becomes more readily attuned to the social, cultural, and political forces that traverse it, writes Bill Ashcroft. 56 Moreover, the overlap of languages that occurs in “english” is itself metonymic: it is the Derridean difference between two cultural spaces. Disdainful of the separation of discourses customary in the Western tradition, the postcolonial critics liberally use poetic techniques in arguing philosophical points, and they shock the uninitiated by explicitly sexual language. Postcolonial 38 Imperial Knowledge novelists follow suit . 57 There are good reasons for these practices, they say. All too often, the colonizer saw the colonized as effeminate, and the subjugated males sometimes acquiesced to the image of effeminacy imposed on them. In Orientalist writings, sexual and political dominance were linked together . 58 Here is one of the points of contact of feminist and postcolonialist critiques: a denigration of femininity in colonialist discourse was countered-by the rise of feminist and gender studies that deconstructed the arrogance and the presumptions of the colonialists. Among the theorists, Homi Bhabha in particular seems to enjoy exercising the sort of power over language that is the reverse of the power once exercised by the colonial masters over the Pakistanis. There is hardly a sentence in Bhabha that does not rely on extraordinary usages. Their presence is a painful (for some) remainder that for all its capacity to contain thought, standard English adjusts with difficulty to structures borrowed from other languages and other civilizations, thus forcing native speakers (let alone non-native ones) into the uncomfortable position of knowing

less than the empire that thus speaks back to the center, and being kept constantly on tiptoe in order not to miss the point. The obverse side of the medal is that standard English has structured human experience in such a way as to exclude sizable chunks of that experience. Bhabha defines textuality (one of the key words in postcolonial discourse) in the following, way: [textuality] “is a productive matrix which defines the ‘social’ and makes it available as an objective of and for action. ... [It is] not simply a second-order ideological expression or a verbal symptom of a pre-given political subject .” 59 This is a reminder that the Enlightenment taxonomies once considered universal are not so by any means. Instructing the center in its central space, that is, in language, is perhaps a sign of the hybrid culture that Said envisioned as a desirable postcolonial future. The native speakers of English have followed suit in that regard: their texts strive to accommodate those previously excluded spaces that the non-native speakers have tried to adumbrate. On the other hand, the major postcolonialists who hail from Asia are well aware of the weight of Western cultural institutions and theoretical practices, and some of them realize that these institutions and practices cannot be sidestepped or ignored. Gayatri Spivak has therefore developed a strategy of negotiation with, rather than rejection of, Western linguistic and philosophical ways. She is well able to combine diverse epistemological systems, and she does not shun inconsistency. Her superb command of English (coupled with an admirable frankness) allows her to remark that postcolonial discourse [is] “a persistent critique of what you cannot not want .” 60 She is right in suggesting that postcolonialism is grounded in resentment but that resentment is not its only or even its determining source. The flaws in the Enlightenment thinking that postcolonial critics have articulated are real, serious, and worth paying attention to. Postcolonialism thus feeds into the broader stream of the critique of the Enlightenment that characterizes late-twentieth-century intellectual life. Interestingly, Leela Gandhi sees Romanticism, and then the New Criticism, as the fountainheads of postcolonial theory. The

concentration of the New Critics on text that was hermetically sealed from “real life” influences reappears in postcolonialism, she suggests, and it takes the form of a fascination with textu ality. Likewise, the Romantic refusal to participate in the ugly world of industrialization finds its parallel in the poststructuralist critic’s retreat into textuality. 61 Texts become enclaves where values expunged from society can nest. It should be pointed out, however, that the habit of rigidly separating areas of experience is also an invention of the Enlightenment. But again, these exchanges are relevant to the West and its colonies. The lands overpowered by the Russians have not yet produced voices that speak back to Empire: indeed, the political conditions are not yet propitious for such voices to be raised in a massive way. How postcolonial discourse develops in the “Russian” Federation, or whether it develops at all in the foreseeable future, will depend on the willingness of men and women in the former or present colonies (including the white settler communities within the Federation) to articulate their will-to-difference in ways that do not rehearse the outdated stereotypes of foreign oppression and native resistance. The militaristic culture of the Russians is best opposed not by the force of arms but by a discursive refusal to be drawn into the quicksands of the rodina-otechestvo mythology. In that connection, it should be noted that a number of postcolonial critics resist the idea of extending the concept of coloniality to geographies other than those that were the dominions of the West. There is resistance to designating settler cultures, such as Australia and North America, as colonial territories. 62 Yet as Helen Tiffin has noted, the identities, or at least perceptions, of these settler communities [have been] “constituted in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism.” 63 The postcolonial critics’ resistance to seeing Australia as partaking of the colonial experience stems from the general perception, among nonwhite populations, of the privileged position of white men and women whose displacement (essential to the colonial experience) was to some degree voluntary

and thus bore no comparison to the forcing of black slaves or Indians to change places of habitation and ways of living. Also, the militarism involved in the conquest of colonies affected the settlers in dramatically different ways than the native peoples. This can be countered by saying that there are various patterns and degrees of colonial dependency and that all of them need to be looked into. Some of the white settlers were convicts sentenced to transportation. Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism persuasively argues that English colonialism affected not only territories overseas but also the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish. It has also been noted by some critics that a state like Quebec, or indeed Canada as a whole, can be seen as postcolonial from one perspective and neocolonial from another. While Canadian identity was subsumed under British identity, the Indian nations of the area were in turn colonized by another colonized nation, or nations . M The strength of resistance of phe postcolonial “establishment to postcolonial claims of white Australians or non-English inhabitants of the British Isles may help explain why the colonizing efforts of Russians in Eastern and Central Europe and in Asia have been ignored in the debates on colonialism. The whiteon-white colonialism that took place there does not fit the colonial theory as construed by such nonwhite theorists as Bhabha or Spivak. Australians and North Americans relocated semivoluntarily, as the empire’s officials, prisoners, or free settlers, and they displaced the indigenous populations of various areas. But tens of millions of white non-Russians who were subjected to Russian military conquest shared with the peoples of Asia and Africa the compulsions and suppressions that characterize classic colonialism. Often they were forced to leave their ancestral lands by the wishes of the colonialist. The leadership positions within the Russian empire and, later, within the Soviet sphere of influence were unavailable to them unless they ceased to represent the interests of their own nations and began to represent Moscow’s interests. 65

Paradoxically, the white Europeans subjected to Russia’s or Germany’s (or imperial Turkey’s, in centuries past) colonial drive are dead last in coming to a realization that they were in fact colonial subjects. They have looked at their Russian or Turkish or German occupiers as the people who won a war against them, not as those who engaged in a long-term colonialist project. They have not yet told their story to the world, even though their native cultures have encouraged the articulation of problems in ways compatible with Western epistemologies. Their silence has consequences. The colonial drive to which they have been subjected falls entirely outside the field of vision of such commentators on postcolonialism as Leela Gandhi, who objects to including even settler cultures in the discourse on postcolonialism, let alone acknowledging the white-onwhite colonialism of modem European empires. Russian colonization in the Caucasus, the Black Sea region and Central Asia has been similarly ignored. As indicate^ earlier, the Soviet Union’s ambivalent role in combating Western colonialism and tsarist Russia’s ability to escape scrutiny helped to delay the realization that colonialism was not limited to Western expansion in Asia and Africa but occurred in Europe as well. The writers whose insights into Western imperialism helped to soften or transform it created the concept of colonial dependency * According to this model, economic exploitation of the periphery was not limited to direct capital transfers but also manifested itself in the compulsion to which the colonies and dominions were subjected in developing their agriculture, industry, culture, demographic patterns, and habits of consumption. The creation of such colonial dependencies by the metropolitan center has been a prime feature of Russian imperialism, notwithstanding the ideological modifications introduced during the Soviet period. The transformation by the Moscow nomenklatura of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan into a raw-material producer for the Russian cotton mills, thereby wiping out Uzbekistan’s tradition of agriculture, polluting the land with chemicals and insecticides, and turning the Aral Sea into a saline desert, is a textbook example of such a dependency. After the suppression of the Quorbashi rebellion in 1922, the conversion of

Uzbekistan’s rich agriculture into cotton-producing collective farms began in earnest. In the best colonialist fashion, it was assisted by the local communists, thus enabling the metropolis to disclaim responsibility and turn an innocent face to the world. Uzbekistan’s orchard plantations were converted into cotton fields, irrigated by the scarce water resources of the region. The scheme worked for a generation. The bountiful cotton harvests made it possible to build the huge cotton mills in the Russian heartland (e.g., in Ivanovo), supplying jobs for tens of thousands of Russians and providing fabrics for the Red Army. Only 2 to 8 percent of Uzbekistan’s cotton was processed locally. However, the transfer of cotton to Russian factories constituted but a fraction of the cost to Uzbekistan of this massive enterprise. A more important result of this relationship was the dislocation of population, loss of jobs in agriculture, unprecedented soil and air pollution, and health problems among the Uzbeks for years to come. The excessive and inept use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers converted Uzbekistan’s oases into a polluted desert that would support no agriculture. When the disaster became so great that the metropolis media began to take interest in it, a fact-finding mission was dispatched from Moscow to Uzbekistan, and journalists began to record in detail what had happened. However, Russia’s imperial ways of subjugating and weakening its dominions remained invisible in their reports. The Russian discourse continued to resist the introduction of terminology pertinent to colonialism. The disaster was blamed on Soviet mismanagement and on the communist system. 67 RUSSIA’S SELF-REPRESENTATION The fact that modem Russia has managed to avoid a terminological appropriation by the West allowed it to exert its own pressure on the West, not only by means of military strength but also through literature and art. That, of course, does not mean that some platonic entity called “Russia” went to work to create an image of itself to outsiders or that Russia developed in total cultural isolation from the

West and then assaulted it with a unique discourse. From Romanticism on, nineteenth-century European cultural trends found their way into Russian culture, and this in turn strengthened Russia’s attractiveness to European consumers. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that the Western intellectual genealogy was dramatically different from the Russian one and that Russian absorption of Western trends accordingly produced different results. The trajectory of Western philosophy has never been duplicated in Russia or internalized by the Russian elites. While Hegel exerted an important influence on Russia, the Russian elites lacked a philosophical preparation for him. Two millennia of philosophizing, including medieval training in syllogistic thinking, lay at the core of Western identity by the time when Hegel appeared on the scene; this kind of preparation for Hegel bypassed Russia altogether. The fundamentals of rationalist logic, of the Enlightenment variety and of the earlier Aristotelian brand, did not permeate Russian culture to the degree observable in Western and Central European cultures. In particular, as I have argued in an earlier book, the principles of identity and non-contradiction have been weakly absorbed by Russian discourse. Instead, the Russian elites drew on the spiritual resources of eastern Christianity, on shamanism, and on their own native intuitions, which favored thinking in paradoxes and blended well with the subsequent Hegelian influence. 68 These epistemological fundamentals contributed to Russia s selfproduced image, which combines vulnerability with strength, simplicity with high civilization, and purity with fierceness. 69 Russian discourse positioned itself largely within a cultural space delimited by the concepts of victimization, creativity, patriotic dedication, and monarchic splendor. The image of Russia affixed in Western memory is that of a victim that has been tremendously creative, a magnificent and geographically boundless country beset by misfortunes 42 Imperial Knowledge but possessed of a remarkable cultural energy and a remarkable love of the motherland/fatherland.

The massive cultural effort launched by'Russia since Catherine the Great (who extended the empire’s border westward in such a way as to make Russia a major player in European affairs) resonated in Russian literature in ways comparable to those that England’s imperial successes engendered in English literature. The economic advantages that accrued from annexations of Russia’s neighbors enabled Catherine to undertake the reshaping of Russian culture, with the intention of placing it on par with the cultures of Europe. 70 Catherine abolished the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and Belarus, and she appropriated for the Russian state and for the Russian Orthodox Church the property of the Ukrainian and Belarusian Catholics. The later tsars confiscated the property of individuals and institutions associated in any way with insurrections in the western provinces of the empire. After the 1863 rising, all Roman Catholic monasteries and convents were abolished in Ukraine and Belarus, and most Catholic Church property was confiscated. Tens of thousands of people were incarcerated in the empire’s prisons, irreparably disrupting social and cultural life, ravaging thousands of emerging middle-class families, and enabling native Russians to pick up the spoils. A recent series of archival publications details the persecution of Catholics in western regions of the Russian Empire; the volumes list thou-* sands of archival documents on the harassment and expropriation of Catholic parishes, monasteries, and convents. 71 As Hugh Seton-Watson has noted, defeating the Poles “increased Russian prestige in Europe.” 72 Russian and foreign readers learned about these and related events from oblique mentions in Russian literature. Dostoevskii ridiculed the Poles in The Brothers Karamazov, suggesting that after the 1863 rising Poles went to Siberia voluntarily, as paid officials of the empire rather than as political prisoners and exiles. Other writers were similarly inaccurate. In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) there is a scene in which Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov enters a room occupied by Fenichka, his brother’s mistress, who eventually will become his wife. The narrator remarks that “along the walls stood chairs with lyre-shaped backs, bought by the late general on his

military campaign in Poland.” 73 The late general, together with Bazarov Sr., had taken part in the suppression of the Polish rising in 1830, and the Russian army had not bought but looted items there. We learn elsewhere that Bazarov Sr. had been penniless when he joined the army as a military doctor and that he had bought his tiny estate upon retiring. The English translation of Turgenev’s novel blurs the issue by failing to gloss the provenance of the items brought back from Russia’s military campaigns. 74 Here is a classic colonialist situation, wherein the empire imposes its discourse on the defeated people and elbows their story out of remembered history. Let us briefly look at the circumstances that enabled Gen. Kirsanov and Dr. Bazarow to enrich themselves in Poland. On 31 October 1831, with the Polish rising thoroughly suppressed, Tsar Nicholas I issued an “edict about individual farmers and citizens of western provinces” [ ukaz o odnodvortsakh i grazhdanakh gubernii zapadnikh ]. While permitting magnates to keep their lands and serfs, the edict deprived the petty nobility of their homes and farms, driving them into landless poverty. 75 Thus many a chair “with a lyre-shaped back” changed hands in those times, but not in conditions of free trade. The recordings of such events in subaltern writings resemble in tone Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth? 6 That these writings did not resonate with Western postcolonial scholarship points to Russia’s continuing ability to hegemonize Western discourse about itself. George Kennan again: “There have been two great periods of Russian expansion into Western Europe. One was under Catherine the Great, and it lasted until the First World War. But that was-that was a policy of dynastic arrangements which didn’t affect the people, the common people very much in any of these countries. The only question was who was their sovereign.” 77 That a diplomat of Kennan’s stature could publicly express such bizarre opinions shows how ideologized Western research on Russia has been and how the authorities in the field ignore evidence not supplied by Western or Russian sources. Kennan can be compared to the nineteenth-century British Orientalist Lord Evelyn Baring

Cromer, for whom Orientals were material to be governed, not subjects possessed of their own legitimate agendas and aspirations. As shown in chapter 4, Russian colonial presence in the non white areas of the Russian empire resulted in a similarly distorted literary treatment of the nonwhite “natives.” Sabirzyan Badretdinov has observed that the imprints of ethnic stereotyping can be found all over Russian literature. 78 The Caucasus natives in Pushkin and Lermontov are either inarticulate or criminal; no forked tongue softens the indictment, as is the case in Joseph Conrad’s novels. The attitude of pugnacious hostility gradually abates with the passing of generations, as evidenced by Dostoevskii’s gentle and condescending presentation of the longdefeated Muslims in The House of the Dead (1861). Tolstoi’s easy incorporation of Germans and Poles into the Russian fold in War and Peace exemplifies the willingness of Russians to absorb the white nationalities of the empire; however, most of them did not wish to be so absorbed. Solzhenitsyn is positively purring when he announces in Cancer Ward that Dr. Gangart is a Russian of German extraction. 79 But there is no trace of understanding in the novel that the Asian natives might have concerns that reach beyond those of the Russians, that their major concern may in fact be the Russians. Such an awareness was part of E. M. Forster’s The Passage to India. How the non white natives are represented in the post-Soviet Russian media and public discourse is a vast and virtually unploughed territory, but huge amounts of material are supplied weekly by Reuters and the Associated Press news services. 80 When Russia’s increasingly assertive voice began to be heard abroad in the nineteenth century, its great novelists produced arguments that the empire was Russia and that the destiny of the peoples within the empire was to remain part of Russia. By means of literatures a great deal of non-Russian territory was rhetorically appropriated, and traditions were invented that made the empire s rim as naturally Russian as was Moscow. A view' had emerged in Russia and abroad that Russia was a country with no natural borders, that it pressed forward only to protect itself, and that its

expansion had a benign civilizational influence. From Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1822) and Lev Tolstoi’s Sevastopol Sketches (1855-56) to Vasilii Azhaev’s Far from Moscow [Daleko ot Moskvy ] (1948) and Iurii Trifonov’s The Satiation of Thirst [Utolenie zhazhdy ] (1963), Russian culture told the Russian masses and the Western elites that the territories from Brest to Vladivostok and from Karelia to Chechnya were rightfully ruled by Moscow. The Russified local elites, Russian colonial settlers, Soviet sports teams, and army choirs represented to foreign audiences a homogenized Russian nation. The Russian colonial enterprise and the empire’s anxieties and uncertainties were concisely (if unintentionally) recorded in the first stanza of the anthem of the now-defunct Soviet Union: The union of inviolable and free republics Was united for ever by the great Rus' Long live the indissoluble and powerful Soviet Union Created by the will of nations. 81 “The invention of tradition” studied by David Cannadine and others in Western Europe is classically represented in this text. The adjective “great” [velikaia] is attributed to Rus' but not to other ethnic groups. It is suggested that at least part of Rus 's greatness consists in having united all these disparate nations, which are perfectly content to belong to the USSR. This, of course, adds insult to injury: Rus' is praised for its aggression against its neighbors. Furthermore, the anthem incorrectly asserts that the neighbors are content to play second fiddle in the union. As explained earlier, the term Rus' has many meanings, and it can stand for Russia as well as for all East Slavs. The anthem allows Ukrainians and Belarusians to partake of greatness, but only as minor parts of Rus'. It stresses the finality of the union and, by implication, the permanence of Russia’s greatness. The lady doth protest too much. The colonial pedagogy of the text goes hand in hand with the finality of the political formation

that it advocates. The anthem was adopted in 1944, when the Soviet Union was poised for victory over Nazi Germany and for a major land grab in Central and Eastern Europe. The USSR was dissolved in 1991, but the anthem’s pedagogy is still operative. Peter Ford has opined that “for liberals and conservatives alike, [Russia’s] future lies at the heart, and at the head, of the countries that surround it, that once made up the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union.” 82 Uri Ra’anan has observed that the Russian national identity has been tied to the empire, just as the English and French identities developed with empire looming in the background. 83 When Evgenii Primakov, then prime minister, said in a speech to Siberian governors on 15 January 1999 that “we [Russians] lost the Soviet Union,” he succinctly expressed one of the idees reques of Russian history. 84 This dependence on the empire helped to establish a hierarchy of values in Russian literature, and it enabled that literature to use the political power of Empire as a springboard from which to leap to the world’s attention. After Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, countless minor writers and scholars wove the fabric of intertextuality reinforcing the central assumptions of the Russian cultural enterprise: its presumed defensiveness rather than aggressiveness; its unique depth; and its ability to bear injuries and injustices of fate, climate, and the evil Other. In the wake of decolonization and a growing awareness of the trajectory of imperialism, the need for imperial reassurance has subsided in the West, but it has remained strong in Russia. The Russians continue to have a taste for historiosophical meditations in which Russia is a centerpiece. 85 The discourse of power in Russia has repeatedly invoked the “Russia first-ness” rule. Politologist Vladimir Pastukhov has argued that the development of the Russian empire has always occurred in revolutionary rather than evolutionary ways and that a new flourishing begins after a deep crisis. The 1990s are part of this cycle. Russia will remain an empire, although perhaps in a different form, opines Pastukhov. 86 In summer 1998 in Ogonek there

appeared a report about the (belated) funeral of Tsar Nicholas II. Journalist Arkadii Sosnov reassured his readers that the funeral was “the number one event in the entire Christian world.” 87 The author bemoaned the fact that Russians paid insufficient attention to an event that kept the rest of the world on tiptoe. Unlike the edited statements of Russia’s prominent personalities, the Ogonek piece was an occasional and uncensored article that appealed to the habits of mind assumed to be common among middlebrow readers. The assumption was correct; there was no barrage of letters in subsequent issues to the effect that few in the non-Russian world would have paid close attention to Nicholas’s final journey. It is within the habits of mind revealed by such articles as Sosnov’s that Russian literature has been written and interpreted. Consider President Yeltsin’s televised address of 31 August 1995 marking the beginning of the new academic year. It structured homage to those who perished under Stalinism in the following way: “Let us not forget what the Communist Party did to Russia, how many officers [italics added], scientists, intellectuals, and peasants perished.” 88 The placing of “officers” as the foremost category on the list of those who deserve mourning, indeed the mentioning of the military first of all, points to a taxonomy that is peculiarly Russian in its treatment of the military as a first priority within society. It suggests that the “Russian” Federation continues to be an army with a country, not a country with an army. Unwittingly, Yeltsin highlighted here the role played by the military in the construction of Russian identity and the identity of the Other. The presence of the military in Russian literature has been one of the neglected topics of Russian literary criticism. If one were to remove persons with military titles from the plays of Chekhov or the novels of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, their plots would collapse. Almost two centuries ago, Russian writer N. I. Grech wrote, “One can confidently affirm that our language is superior to all the modem European languages.” 89 In an article published in 1945, the late Dmitrii S. Likhachev called for the creation of an entire library of studies proclaiming the resplendent beginnings of the Russian state.

90 He dedicated much of his professional life to the task, drawing on the Soviet imperial treasury. At the end of the twentieth century, he could boast of having achieved his goal. There now exists an entire library of works arguing that Old Russia, which blended into the Muscovite state, had a rich culture and was a large and unified country. The works that Likhachev and his followers have produced disable the attempts of minorities to stress their own distinct origins in territories claimed by the “Russian” Federation. Like the Western discipline of Orientalism, Likhachev’s enterprise has created an authoritative corpus of academic books and articles inscribing in 46 Imperial Knowledge Russian and Western memory the splendor of Rossiia. Only empires can accomplish this. That Western academics by and large lost the perception of the tsarist-Soviet colonial continuity was in large measure a concession to those who saw in Soviet Russia a new type of political structure, the wave of the future—those who, like Jules Romains, put their hopes in cette grande lueur a I’Est , The academics and politicians who deconstructed Western colonialism often sympathized with Soviet Russia’s political system. 91 They considered tsarist Russia backward, feudal, oppressive, and capitalist—but not colonialist, for ostensibly it did not covet colonies overseas. The financial, military, and diplomatic contributions that the Soviet Union made to the “antiimperialist” cause in third-world countries made it difficult to advance the view that Russia was engaging in practices it so energetically condemned outside its sphere of influence. Valeriia Novodvorskaia put it this way: “When the Soviet dissidents from the metropolis brought down communism (or perhaps just set it aside) . . . they solved most of their problems, With a few exceptions, they deemed it madness for the dissidents from Russia’s colonies to start solving their own particular problems.” 92 Perhaps there was a bit of condescension in the Western scholars’ blindness to Russian colonialism, and not only in literature but in politics. Russia, with her poorly developed consumer economy and

an ambivalent status as a great powei* on the outskirts of Europe, might have been deemed incapable of generating the disciplined and long-memoried effort needed to join the military and cultural struggle for control of the world’s less pugnacious peoples. In bypassing Russia as a major player in the colonial game, the anti-imperialist writers of the West demonstrated their skepticism that this Slavic country was fit to participate in the colonial race. Russia seemed so remote from the countries engaged in the scramble for colonies that its writings did not have to be subjected to methodologies that deconstructed the great Western texts. It was so much easier to believe, as Hobsbawn seems to have done, that modem Russia came to be because its subjects wanted to be part of the “holy Russian land.” 93 If Russia had been treated by scholars on par with Great Britain, the assumption that only Western civilization was capable of generating colonial desire and imposing its own textual vision of the world on the Other would have been put to rest. An admission that Russian policy included a sustained colonial effort would have diminished the West and exposed its blindness to colonial structures and methods of conquest that were not of its making. 94 In 1945-89, Western articulations of Russian realities sailed close to the rhetoric of the creators of socialist utopias, responding to them and explicating them. The Russian intellectuals —such as they were, under communism-encouraged this erroneous usage, as it added to their status inside and outside the country. The perception of incongruity, the startling discovery that there is a mismatch in the discourse on Russia between Western intellectual categories and Russian realities, has been variously noted but seldom energetically pursued. 95 The post-World War II period brought an end to Western empires, but it took another fifty years to destabilize the empire of the Russians. The Eastern empire lived on virtually undisturbed until Solidarity in Poland called its bluff, and until its own economic and nationalistic inefficiencies made it

shed its communist economic system. In the 1990s, it began to crumble but did not altogether disappear. 96 In the post-Soviet period, when the Soviet union republics broke away from the “Russian” Federal Republic, the process of partial decolonization was generally perceived as decommunization, a view that allowed the colonial nature of the metropolitan center to slip away from sight. Yet the Moscow-centered “Russian” Federation remains an imperial entity, and Russian texts continue to assure native and foreign readers that nothing is amiss in that regard. But just as the white colonies of England eventually claimed independent existence, so might the autonomous republics and regions of the “Russian” Federation begin to claim a larger share of autonomy. 97 Upon Evgenii Primakov’s ascendancy to premiership in September 1998, a commentator observed: “Whether Primakov is the right person to govern Russia is one question. Whether Russia is still governable is another. Moscow’s failure to cope with the deepening economic crisis has aggravated separatist tendencies in the provinces, raising fears that Russia . . . could go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991 .” 98 Remarking on Primakov’s suggestion that Moscow should take the lead in putting together a new international coalition against the principle of national self-determination, another commentator argued that “in acknowledging the extent of the difficulties Russia now faces, Primakov joins a growing number of Russian political figures who have suggested that the future of their country in its current borders may be in doubt.” 99 The empire put together by a remarkable drive for power is in danger of final disintegration. The role played by writers in constructing it, holding it together, hiding its splits and crevices, protesting its dissolution, and, finally, acknowledging its demise, is the subject of subsequent chapters. NOTES 1. Edward Keenan, “On Certain Mythical Beliefs and Russian Behaviors,” The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of

Eurasia, edited by S. Frederick Starr, vol. 1 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 19-10. 2. Slovar' russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1957-61). 3. I. A. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1966), 364. 4. New York Times, 14 December 1991. 5. Milan Kundera, “A Conversation with Philip Roth,” translated by Peter Kussi, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Heim (New York: Penguin, 1980); and Jaan Kross, The Czar's Madman, translated by Anselm Hollo (New York: Pantheon, 1993). 6. August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia (184752), edited by S. Frederick Starr, translated by Eleanore L. M. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1972), 310. 7. “Ot Pol'shi ostalas samaia malost'. ... I Oni ne liubili povadok nashikh, / Vel'mozhnyi krivili rot.” 8. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 134. 9. In August 1995, Clarinet News carried an article describing the woes of a recent Russian-language major at Sofia University. She enrolled in another program of study, because the demand for Russian teachers had nearly evaporated. In 1990 the chairperson of the University of Warsaw's Russian Department, Antoni Semczuk, introduced English alongside Russian in order to keep enrollment up. 10. Rimzil Valiev, Rim Sitdikov, and Guelnar Khasanova, “1997 in Review: Tatarstan Faces Challenges,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 31 December 1997.

11. Sabirzyan Badretdinov, “Sincere Soldiers and Naive Servants,” Transitions 5, no. 12 (December 1998), 98. 12. According to the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages statement issued at 1993 San Francisco meeting, a 50 percent drop in Russian enrollments occurred at American universities in the 1990s, compared to the 1980s. 13. Paul Goble, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 21 September 1998. 14. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975). 15. Hechter, 30. 16. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Mortal Danger, translated by M. Nicholson and A. Klimoff (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 14— 16. 17. N. Iu. Zograf, Antropologicheskie issledovaniia muzhskogo velikorusskogo naseleniia Vladimirskoi, Iaroslavskoi i Kostromskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1890); M. P. Veske, Slaviano-finskie kulturnye otnocheniia po dannym iazyka (Kazan': Obshchestvo Ark-^ heologii, Istorii i Etnografii, 1890). 18. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, translated by P. S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 95. 19. Transcript of George Kennan's conversation with David Gergen, MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, 18 April 1996. 20. Foremost among such Russia-firsters is Stephen Cohen. As late as September 14, 1998 ( MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour), he urged that Russia be helped in any way possible, regardless of the politics of its leadership, expressing alarm about the stirrings toward independence of some of Russia's “regions.”

21. Richard Pipes, “Is Russia Still an Enemy?” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (September-October 1997), 72. 22. Peter Ford, “The View from the Kremlin: Russia as Eternal Superpower,” Christian Science Monitor Online, 29 May 1997. 23. George Kennan: “I think we ought to be careful in judging them because we must remember that the Russian troops came into the heart of Europe with our full approval.” “A Conversation with David Gergen,” MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, 18 April 1996. Also George Kennan, “On American Principles,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 2 (MarchApril 1995), 116-26. 24. Gandhi, 170. 25. A commentary on the Ukrainian vote for independence that took place on 1 December 1991. MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, 2 December 1991. 26. S. During, “Post-colonialism,” in Beyond the Disciplines: Papers from the Australian Academy of the Humanities Symposium, edited by K. K. Ruthven, no. 13 (Canberra, Australia: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1992), 95. 27. Jozef Czapski’s Inhuman Soil [Ziemia nieludzka\ was first published in 1956 by Institut Litteraire (Paris). 28. Maty Rocznik Statystyczny (Warsaw: Glowny Urz^d Statystyczny, 1995), 44. 29. Peter Ford, “Crossing Europe,” Christian Science Monitor Online, 19 and 31 July 1998. 30. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). 31. P. Putnam, ed. Seven Britons in Imperial Russia, 1698-1812 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952).

32. Phyllis Penn Kohler, ed. and trans., Journey for Our Time: The Russian Journals of the Marquis de Custine (Washington, DC: Gateway, 1987). 33. Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin, Decolonizing Cultures (Sydney, Australia: Dangaroo Press, 1993), 127. 34. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1967. 35. Pipes (1974), 120. Not unrelated to this primacy of the military is the fact that in the 1999 Russian budget, in spite of draconian cuts in virtually all areas of state spending, enough money was assigned for the military to allow for 62 percent pay increases for soldiers and 102 percent increases for officers. Michael Gordon, “Russia Offers 1999 Budget,” New York Times, 11 December 1998. 36. George Vernadsky, A History of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1961); and N. V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984). 37. Jaroslaw Czubaty, Rosja i swiat: Wyobraznia polityczna elity wtadzy imperium rosyjskiego wpoczqtkach XIX wieku (Warsaw: Neriton, 1997), 61. 38. Norman Davies, “World War II: Grand Illusions,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 9,25 May 1995. 39. Judith H. Dobrzynski, “Russia Pledges to Give Back Some of Its Art Looted in War,” New York Times, 3 December 1998. 40. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, translated by Rebecca Frank (New York: Dell, 1968), 34. 41. Said (1994), 7,9. 42. Ibid., 84. 43. Ibid., 285.

44. Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1993). 45. E. M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Iurii Lotman is likewise an exception. 46. A. Filippov, “Smysl imperii: k sotsiologii politicheskogo prostranstva,” S. B. Chernyshev, ed., Inoe. Khrestomatiia novogo rossiiskogo samosoznaniia, vol. 3 (Moscow: Argus, 1995), 421-76. 47. “Umom Rossiiu ne poniat',” Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 April 1990; and “Otzvuki velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v russkoi kul'ture,” Novyi mir, no. 7 (July 1989), 185-87. 48. V. Ushakov, “Nemyslimaia Rossiia,” in Chernyshev, ed., Inoe, vol. 3, 393^120. 49. O. N. Trubachev, Vpoiskakh edinstva (Moscow: Nauka, 1992). 50. See the critique of Said's book in Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1998), 34-73. 51. Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory. 52. Typical in this regard is O. N. Trubachev's Vpoiskakh edinstva. 53. Gandhi, 89. / 54. Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin, eds., ReSiting Queen's English: Text and Tradition in Post-Colonial Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992). 55. Bill Ashcroft et al.. The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989), 38-39. 56. Ibid., 52.

57. What used to be the domain of poetry: expressions such as “brief space” or “halfworld” appear in prose narratives in abundance. Edgar Mittelholzer, My Bones and My Flute (London, 1955), 43. 58. Gandhi, 99-100. 59. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 23. 60. Gayatri Spivak, “Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge,” quoted in Moore-Gilbert, 78. 61. Gandhi, 160. 62. Ibid., 168-69. 63. 1. Adam and H. Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Postcolonialism and Postmodernism (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), vii. 64. Moore-Gilbert, 10. 65. In Maria Dqbrowska's roman-fleuve, Noce i dnie (1934), a group of Polish university students gathers to read the forbidden books, knowing full well that the road to social advancement is closed to them because they are Polish and not Russian. The action of the novel takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 66. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by C. Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 101. 67. Georgii Shengeli, “Aral'skaia katastrofa,” Novyi mir, no. 5 (May 1989), 176-181. 68. Nikolai Berdiaev was the first to observe this. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea, translated by R. M. French (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Berdiaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, translated by R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955); and G. Gorer and J.

Rickman, The People of Great Russia (1949) (New York: Norton, 1962), 187. 69. E. M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). 70. Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 86-90; Tadeusz Bobrowski, Pamigtnik mojego zycia, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1979), 223, 441-522; and Pipes (1974), 118-119. An awareness of these appropriations was expressed by Adam Mickiewicz in “Ust?p” (1832). 71. Marian Radwan, ed., Inwentarz materialow do dziejow Kosciola Katolickiego w Rzeczypospolitej i w Rosji [Inventory of materials about the history of the Catholic Church in the Polish Respublica and in Russia], 3 vols. (Lublin: Instytut Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej, 1997-98). 72. Seton-Watson,435. 73. Vdol' sten stoiali stul'ia s zadkami v vide lir; oni byli kupleny eshche pokoinikom generalom v Pol'she, vo vremia pokhoda.” Ivan Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1961), 149. 74. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, edited by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton 1966), 27. 75. Seton-Watson, 280—88; and Andrzej Nowak, ed., Kronika Polski (Krakow: Kluszczynski, 1998), 431. 76. Juliusz Slowacki’s Anhelli is a poignant expression of subaltern frustration and anger. Written more than a hundred years before Fanon’s work, it uses a different genre (poetic prose) to express frustrations of a subjugated people. Juliusz Stowacki, Dziela wszystkie, vol. 3 (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1952), 9-59. In

English,An/ie/^ translated by Dorothea Prall Radin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930). 77. Interview with David Gergen. See n. 19. 78. Badretdinov, 97-100. 79. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 74. 80. “The term ‘human rights activist’ has become an insult in Russia,” said Rachel Denber, Moscow representative of the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki watchdog group, in 1995. The group's report said that Russia's human rights record worsened significantly in 1995 as compared to the early 1990s: “Russian forces prosecuted a brutal war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya with total disregard for humanitarian law, causing thousands of needless civilian casualties.” Reuter (Moscow), 8 December 1995. 81. “Soiuz nerushimykh respublik svobodnykh / Na veki splotila Velikaia Rus' / Da zdravstvuet sozdannyi volei narodov / Edinyi moguchii Sovetskii Soiuz.” 82. Peter Ford, “The View from the Kremlin: Russia as Eternal Superpower,” Chris tian Science Monitor Online, 29 May 1997. Ford also points out that in 1997 Aman Tuleev, the governor of Kemerovo, remarked, “That festival of sovereignties [declarations of independence by the former Soviet republics] is already behind us. . . . The Commonwealth has to be led by its leader, Russia.” In the preface to his book, The Struggle for Russia, President Boris Yeltsin wrote, “I have always maintained that Russia should remain a strong power in any age. . . . The status of a great power was handed down to us as a legacy, not only as the foundation of our consciousness and our culture, but as the code of Russia's very state structure.” Leonid Fituni, head of the liberal Center for Strategic and Global Studies think tank in Moscow, predicted the following: “Of course, when Russia gets to its feet, heals its wounds, when its economy is expanding, it will look beyond

its borders_If Russia is strong, there will inevitably be a process of ex pansion—first economic, and then political.” 83. Uri Ra'anan, “Introduction,” in Uri Ra'anan, ed.. The Soviet Empire: The Challenge of National and Democratic Movements (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1990), x. 84. Agence France-Presse, 15 January 1999. 85. Chernyshev, ed., Inoe. 86. Vladimir Pastukhov, “Budushchee Rossii vyrastaet iz proshlogo. Postkommunizm kak logicheskaia faza razvitiia evraziiskoi tsivilizatsii,” Polis, nos. 5-6 (1992). 87. “Pokhorony Nikolaia II—sobytie nomer odin vo vsem kreshchennom mire.” Arkadii Sosnov, “Neliubov' k otechestvennym grobam,” Ogonek, no. 28 (13 July 1998). 88. Reported by Penny Morvant in OMRI Daily Digest, 1 September 1995. 89. Davies, 1984, 89. 90. D. S. Likhachev, review of B. D. Grekov’s Kul'tura Kievskoi Rusi in Istoricheskii zhurnal, vol. 1/2 (137/138) (1945), 89-90. 91. A partial list includes Rosa Luxemburg, J. A. Hobson, Gabriel Kolko, J. A. Schumpeter, Hannah Arendt, Paul Kennedy, William Appleman Williams, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Walter Lefeber. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 5. 92. Valeriia Novodvorskaia, “Brosaite za bort vse, chto pakhnet krov'iu,” Novoe nremia (September 1996). Translated by Steven Clancy, “Throw Everything Overboard That Smells of Blood.” Sarmatian Review 17, no. 3 (1997), 482.

93. E. J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2d rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 65. 94. The American economist Paul Marer has argued that Russia sustained economically the nonviable Central European states. Paul Marer, Dollar GNPs of the USSR and Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985); Paul Marer, ed., East European Integration and East-West Trade (Bloomingtomlndiana Univ Press, 1980); and Paul Marer, Soviet and East European Foreign Trade (Bloomington: Indiana 95. William C.Vuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992). 96. In 1995, the 90th “autonomous” province was created around the Baikonur aerodrome and the town of Leninsk, leased from Kazakhstan for two decades. On the other hand, the region of Chechnya is heading for independence, thus decreasing the number of provinces back to 89. 97. In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 15, 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested that the Federation be reorganized into a confederation consisting of the Russian mainland in European Russia, the central region of Siberia, and the Far East. 98. Christian Caryl, “Russia's Tough Guy,” U. S. News and World Report Online, 21 September 1998. 99. Paul Goble, “Can Russian Diplomacy Hold Russia Together?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 23 September 1998. 2

Engendering Empire The first archive of cultural descriptions that begin to define the Russians as successful imperialists consists of Russian Romantic writings about the Caucasus. Literary representations of Caucasus natives contained in these writings entered the canon of Russian literature, contributed to Russian self-perception, and influenced attitudes toward the Caucasus dwellers. The Romanticizing of colonialism in the works of Pushkin and Lermontov had its parallels in Orientalist literature of Western Europe. However, while Western Orientalism relied largely on expository writings, in Russia the role of poets and novelists was preeminent. Orientalist-style expository writings were limited to secret papers and memoranda prepared by Russian diplomats for the benefit of the crown. 1 That this literary archive was created relatively late in Russian imperial history was due to the specificity of Russian cultural development that lagged behind territorial development. Before Pushkin and Lermontov appeared on the literary scene, Russia was not sufficiently literate to transform imperial experience into textual authority. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Muscovy, secular literature had been meager, and cultural records had been largely religious, written in a language and an alphabet accessible to only a few hundred people in the realm. One of the few secular works of that period, a book of household rules titled Domostroi, focused on individual households rather than on society or politics. 2 The first part of Domostroi instructs the reader in how to believe in God and how to honor the tsar, but the remainder is devoted to family relations and household chores, such as pickling cucumbers for winter. 3 Side by side with this nonhegemonic view of the world, however, there existed secrecy, maintained under several tsars, about the conquest of Siberia: the Dutch traveler Isaac Massa speaks about it in his book on Russia. 4 Partly due to that secrecy, the conquest of Siberia in the seventeenth century generated no

great literary lore, and writers visions of their country continued to be isolationist, introverted, and timid. In the mid-seventeenth century, there occurred a considerable influx into Moscow of writers from the Kiev Academy who were fluent in Polish, Russian, and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) and who introduced into Russian the Western European literary genres. Until that time, Polish and Latin had been the only “Western” tongues known to the Muscovites. The idea of claiming leadership among East Slavs, let alone among all Slavs, seemed alien to the Muscovite mentality. 5 In 1672, the Kiev-educated Lazar Baranovich dedicated two of his Polish works to the sons of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. In a letter to the tsar he said, “I wrote these works in Polish because I know that your son Fedor Alekseevich can read not only our native tongue but also Polish. ... I dedicated [my other book] to your son Ivan Alekseevich because I know that members of your State Council. .. . also read Polish books with pleasure.” 6 At that time, Polish secular literature was abundant and sophisticated by comparison to the Russian, although it was by no means as developed as Western European literatures; it formed the first and significant bridge between Muscovite writings and those of Western Europe. In an effort to erase the memory of that dependency, Russian literary historians later reinterpreted the seventeenth-century transition period, overemphasizing eighteenth-century contacts with Western Europe and suppressing Ruthenian-Muscovite and Polish-Muscovite contacts that occurred earlier. 7 5 Peter the Great and his wars were conducive to the appearance of imperial literature, but there was little time in Peter’s Russia for things intellectual, as Russian energies were spent on gaining access to the Baltic and on weakening Sweden and Poland. Under Catherine the Great, when another push westward occurred, the insecure voices of Russia’s spokespersons asserted the country’s imperial status with a grace less than that befitting a successful state-building venture. It was under Catherine and her successors that the articulation of Empire began to take place, in various reports and memoranda written by her ministers and envoys. 8 It was

assisted by visible signs of a thriving political enterprise. The wealth plundered from the newly annexed western territories and extracted from the Siberian mines helped to refashion St. Petersburg into a “northern Venice. In the 1760s and 1770s, Catherine the Great began to assemble the first collections of European drawings and paintings that later would become the cornerstone of the Hermitage Museum. Thousands of European works of art made their home in Russia (the first collection bought by Catherine, that of Count Cobenzl, had more than four thousand master drawings by Western European artists); 9 Petersburg architecture acquired the features of European styles. Court writers appropriately sought a new identity, even though neither the Russian language nor the atmosphere of the imperial court was particularly hospitable to that development: Catherine once quipped that half of her court could not read and twothirds could not write. The empire’s successes created an enabling atmosphere, in which the court writers tried to assume a tone new to Russian discourse. How did the culture that produced Domostroi and borrowed its first scribes and experts on literacy from the Jesuit-run Polish schools in Ukraine and from the Greek Orthodox hierarchy acquire the consciousness of being an empire within just a few generations? Between the Muscovite cultural happenings and Nikolai Karamzin’s magisterial yet fanciful History of the Russian State [Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo ] (1818-20) stand the eighteenth-century versifiers and plodders, who are duly mentioned in the histories of Russian literature but whose rough-hewn language and intellectual imitativeness made them a miserable army. However, in their attempts to graft Western European literary genres onto the Russian language, they struck a radically new note, as if the Muscovite past did not exist and Russian literature was naturally seeking its proper voice as a companion and comrade in arms to the ancient European traditions that produced French Classicism and German Romanticism. Sumarokov’s elegies, Kheraskov’s epic poems and Derzhavin’s odes would have fallen into oblivion as works of art, but they were uplifted by the current of

success that lifts all imperial ships. A studious amnesia concerning the ways of old Muscovy and the Ruthenian-Muscovite contacts began to manifest itself in Russian literature at that time. Muscovite religious and folk poetry went out of fashion, and never-beforeutilized forms of expression made their appearance. Yet Derzhavin’s crude flattery toward Catherine in the “Felitsa” ode echoed Muscovite worship of the despot, and it later resonated in Petia Rostov’s worship of the emperor in War and Peace and in the obsequiousness of the lower classes in Andrej Belyi’s St. Petersburg (1913). These occasional eruptions of old traditions, however, had to do with the content rather than form of literary texts. The absence in eighteenth and nineteenth-century works of formal links with the Muscovite literary tradition is remarkable, and it indicates a conscious effort to deliver a new literature. This is where the articulation of Empire begins: in the bold attempt to strike a new tone appropriate for Russia’s magnificent new capital and its enormous territorial possessions. Nikolai Karamzin’s History was the first major step in the direction of what might be called the textual empire. Its underlying concern was Russia’s resplendent destiny. The work was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I. Upon completing the first eight volumes, Karamzin received from the tsar a promotion to the rank of State Councillor ( statskii sovetnik ), a medal, and sixty thousand rubles to cover the cost of publication. 10 The tsar liked the work so much that Karamzin was released from the obligation of submitting his History to the state censor, a rare exception in the Russian political system, where even Pushkin had to submit to censorship. Unlike the minor poets associated with Catherine who, as befitted nouveau riches, stressed their connection to European literacy rather than to the style of writing produced by their own culture, Karamzin confidently undertook the task of linking Muscovy to the Russian empire. In fact, his History did not progress beyond the period of smuta in the early seventeenth century, thus failing to explain Muscovy’s giant leap toward imperium. Karamzin heaped praise on the tsars who enlarged the borders of the state by all means

possible, an indication that he understood well the connection between the empire’s military victories and its growing prestige in Europe. He was the first Russian intellectual to lay his considerable talent entirely on the altar of the state, articulating Russia’s territorial aspirations and providing a blueprint for the defense of Russian acquisitiveness. In that regard, he played a role that his contemporary, G. W. F. Hegel, played in the Prussian state. Karamzin rehearsed his praise of Russian history in the biweekly he founded, The Messenger of Europe [Vestnik Evropy ], even before he set out to write his History. In 1802, he wrote, “Unlike the Greeks and the Romans, we [the Russians] do not need to make up stories and fables to elevate our background: glory was the cradle of the Russian nation, and victory was its messenger. The Roman Empire learned our Slavic might, as we went there and destroyed the Roman legions. The Byzantine historians present our ancestors as wonderful people to whom everyone surrendered and who possessed extraordinary courage and knightly gentleheartedness.” 11 The first edition of Karamzin’s History was published in three thousand copies. The market included Alexander I’s courtiers and some thousand Russian landowners who could afford and were interested in a work of many volumes. Karamzin was also read by the alien nobility of the subjugated societies, and a certain number of copies were sent as gifts to foreign notables. His work came out at a crucial moment of Russian history: during his lifetime and for the first! time in history, Russia was admitted to the concert of European powers. Its major-player status was confirmed during the Napoleonic wars. More perhaps than any other European empire, Russia basked in the glory of the Congress of Vienna. The friendship of the tsar and the authority of Russian accomplishments contributed to the certainty of tone that Karamzin assumed in his work, and hence to the appearance of a Russocentrism that characterizes that work. In defiance of available evidence, Karamzin proclaimed the existence of a common culture within the empire. Other historians followed suit and provided crucial ideological support, saturating the literary

market with a body of self-contained discourse that left no room for uncertainty, let alone dissent. Nikolai Polevoi published History of the Russian Nation [Istoriia russkogo naroda ] in 1829-33, while Nikolai Ustrialov came out with Russian History [Russkaia istoriia ] in 1837^40. Mikhail Pogodin edited, as a supplement to his monthly Moskvitianin, a series of works on Russian history and letters (184156). Ustrialov’s work eventually became the official, governmentapproved textbook of Russian history, and it had many editions. 12 Over the years, the historians’ contribution to the invention of a unified imperial culture was taken for granted by other writers, and it played a role in the development of the so-called Slavophile (actually Russophile) movement. It percolated through the school system and through the works of literature, and it is still alive in the textbooks of history and other political writings of the post-Soviet period, even though, significantly, imaginative literature has begun to withdraw its support from it. The innumerable appeals to the community of interests of the empire’s inhabitants that issued from the Moscow politicians at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as attempts to keep the Commonwealth of Independent States alive, go back to the imperial vision first articulated in Karamzin’s work. To use Hobsbawn’s term, he was truly the inventor of tradition. The invocations of imperial greatness such as Karamzin’s have to be classified as direct textual expressions of aggressive nationalism. As argued in the introduction, the priorities of this kind of nationalism are different from those manifested by the defensive variety. Aggressive nationalism does not boast of democratic institutions but of manifest destiny. It stresses the enormousness of the state it represents, its diverse geography and history, its labors to discover lands that were previously unknown, unoccupied, and unproductive. Words such as mnogonarodnyi (multinational) are among the favorites of aggressive nationalism, for they emphasize the scope of its colonial enterprise while also suggesting a broad-mindedness of the conqueror who allows all those diverse possessions to exist within the empire. However, even such passionate expressions of devotion to the state

as those of Karamzin seemed insufficient to some Russians of his generation. During his retirement years, General Aleksei Ermolov was engaged in a search for “an ardent pen to describe the progress of the Russian people from insignificance to glory; in his view, Karamzin’s History was not patriotic enough.” 13 Ermolov’s search for the ever more grandiose inventors of tradition illustrates the continuing need for new designs ensuring social cohesion within a polity where Russia and Russians constituted a territorial minority and a demographic plurality. Karamzin’s History and its progeny would have had limited impact, however, had the topic of Russia’s magnificence been not reinforced in belles letters. It is here that the conclusive battle for the empire took place. The narratives of military prowess, danger, and adventure in exotic locales that subsequently “joined” Russia made their appearance in large numbers in the early nineteenth century. The conquest of the Caucasus, with its largely Muslim population and relative proximity to the center of the empire, generated a large corpus of writings and, with it, stereotypes of the subjugated peoples and of what it meant to be a Russian: traveling to primitive lands and claiming them for the enlightened Russian crown. As if to make up for the tardiness with which the Russian imperial consciousness emerged in literature, the cultural appropriation of the Caucasus was accompanied by frequent outbursts of prideful annoyance at those who questioned the civilizational advantages of Russian expansion. The moral judgment passed on the defeated was epitomized in Lermontov’s description of the Chechens as “evil” and in Pushkin’s haughty tone in dealing with the “defeated currents” (pobezhdennaia stikhiia ). A moral condemnation of those who lost is frequent in the literatures of nascent empires, and Russian literature was no exception. NARRATING THE CAUCASUS Russian writings about the alien geography of the Caucasus reinforced one another and in time generated other texts in which certain taxonomies of the Caucasus were already taken for granted.

V. G. Kieman observed that all modem empires imitated one another; 14 among Russians, Aleksandr Pushkin in particu lar was an eager student of the Orientalist ways of approaching the Other. Like French and British imperial expeditionists describing their voyages to remote parts of the world, he applied the high-handed approach of a civilized European observer visiting savage lands that had never attained to a written culture or nationhood. He assumed the posture of a universalizing agent, and his articulation of what he had seen would give rise to the idea of a mute Asia that had never achieved self-knowledge (while the Caucasus separates Asia from Europe, Pushkin never bothered to adhere to geographical names: for him, the Caucasus was Asia, period). Neither he nor Mikhail Lermontov had any doubts about the righteousness of their enterprise, even if on occasion they divided the Russian spokespersons into the worthy (Maksim Maksimych, Sukhorukov, Burtsov) and the unworthy (Pechorin). They had no doubts that the lands they visited would be better off as part of a civilization wearing the uniform of the Russian Cossacks. They invoked the authority of French and English writers, citing their remarks and adopting their rhetorical techniques. In Russian Romantic literature, the Caucasus is seen from the perspective of the Russian soldier or officer enduring the hardships of a journey into a dangerous and ungrateful land. The strictly military goal of these adventures distinguishes them from the writings of Western Orientalists, who usually went to the ' Orient as scholars or businessmen. Seen from this military perspective, the natives are invariably primitive, even when, as was the case with Armenians and Georgians, even a casual student of history might have reflected on the scope of their recorded memory. The Caucasus women are passive and sensual, while the men combine fierceness with cowardice. The admissions of political and economic gains accruing to Russia as a result of the conquest are absent in Russian texts, but a sense of Russia’s civilizing mission is omnipresent.

Russian articulation of the Caucasus took the form of travelogues, poems, short stories, novels, and histories. These texts abound in strategies to “contain” the natives within the categories of discourse supplied by a superior outsider. Comments about the land being wild and exotic loom large, particularly in prose narratives. Wild landscapes naturally contain “wild” people: the writers foreground those elements of foreign realities that they wish to affix in the memory of readers innocent of a prior encounter with the area. They savor stories about the lack of hygiene of the inhabitants and the childlike quality of their thinking. Just as Giles Fletcher presented naked and crazy-looking beggars in the streets of Moscow in the sixteenth century as beings profoundly alien and inferior, so does Pushkin regale his readers with lurid details in his description of beggars in Tiflis’s (Tbilisi’s) open markets. The first description was penned in 1588, the second in 1835; in two and a half centuries, Russia had transformed itself from an object of a proto-Orientalist description to a subject generating Orientalist descriptions. Before the Russians gathered enough strength to launch the conquest of the Caucasus, the area had been inhabited by peoples of mostly Turkic stock. Kingdoms rose and fell there in the Middle Ages, and a throng of rulers of both sexes remained in the memory of nations and tribes, upholding an awareness of their ancient history and fostering aspirations to independent statehood. This last goal was thwarted many times by religious differences and the linguistic fragmentation typical of mountainous and isolated areas. Difficult to cross even in summer, the rugged peaks of the Caucasus do not encourage communication and good-neighborliness. The Russian adventure in the Caucasus began with Peter the Great, who took advantage of the Christian-Muslim mix of the population. He and his successors established coalitions with other Christian rulers in the region, only to betray them to the Muslims whenever expedient. Encouraged by the victorious war with Sweden and Poland, Peter decided to try his luck in the South and invaded

Persia, then in decline. In 1722, he launched a southern campaign, capturing in the same year the city of Derbent, and in 1723 Baku. In the course of the campaign, one of the Christian kings of the region, Wakhtang VI, supported Peter, but Peter gave him no help when the Turks overran his kingdom. The peace concluded with Turkey in 1724 left Baku in Russian hands, while Wakhtang’s kingdom was ceded to Turkey. A similar sequence of events occurred under Catherine II who used Herkules II, king of Georgia, as an ally in her war with Turkey in 1768-74, to abandon him when the newly powerful Persian ruler, Aga Mohammed Shah, attacked Georgia, then a Russian protectorate, massacred the population of Tiflis, and reconquered the country for Persia. The Georgians found themselves in a no-win situation. Their southern neighbors were Muslims, and their northern neighbor were Russians, who had betrayed them in the past. To go it alone meant taking risks too large for a small nation. In the late eighteenth century, Georgians decided to seek another alliance with Russia. This time, they sought guarantees from the Russians that the Georgian royal family would retain the throne. But Paul I abandoned the Caucasus temporarily and exposed Georgia once more to Persian rage. Alexander I offered incorporation into the Russian empire rather than the protectorate status that the Georgians desired. They accepted it as a lesser evil, and incorporation was proclaimed in a manifesto issued in 1801. The Georgian king abdicated the throne, but rival claims to the Georgian throne, coupled with a strong national self-awareness, necessitated frequent pacifications of the population by Russian troops. In 1802, General Tsitsianov was dispatched to calm down the Georgians. He was assassinated in 1806. 15 The annexation of Georgia marks the beginning of a thirty years war launched by a huge empire against small mountain principalities, the war the empire was bound to win. The Caucasus hostilities were not interrupted by the Napoleonic invasion, a circumstance that points to how little damage was inflicted by Napoleon on the Russian polity. While one group of Russian generals conducted a defensive war all

the way to Moscow and then pursued Napoleon back to France, another group conducted an offensive in the south and signed the treaty of Gulistan (1813). The treaty ceded to the empire most of today’s Azerbaijan, all the way to the Persian border. 16 Bit by bit and treaty after treaty, those thirty years delivered to the empire the entire Caucasus range and much of Transcaucasia. Most devastating for the mountain peoples was the campaign of General Aleksei Ermolov. 17 It was launched in 1816, lasted until 1827, and resulted in genocidal massacres of several ethnic groups. Ermolov was famed for destroying food, seed grain, cattle fodder, and forests. 18 He subjugated the Avars and the Chechens, and secured for Russia the entire length of the Terek River. The exploits of Ermolov’s army of fifty thousand survived in Russian memory, untouched by reflexive knowledge and second thoughts, as an aweinspiring but essentially noble achievement. Unlike the conquest of Siberia or the slaughter of some twenty thousand civilians in the Warsaw suburb of Praga in 1794 (one of General Aleksandr Suvorov s accomplishments), the Caucasus exploits were boldly advertised in imaginative literature. In a letter permeated with uncharacteristic humility, Aleksandr Pushkin offered to become General Ermolov’s secretary, editor, and publisher. He told the general that while Napoleon’s campaign in Russia received much attention from writers even though it had ended in failure, the spectacularly successful campaign of General Ermolov in the Caucasus had not been sufficiently recognized. Pushkin went on to beg the general to allow him to edit his memoirs about the Caucasus victory: “Your glory belongs to all of Russia, and you have no right to conceal it.” The compliment was later extended, in reverse, to Pushkin, by Ermolov’s successor in the Caucasus, Field Marshal I. F. Paskevich. After allowing the poet to experience briefly the pleasures of participating in a war against the mountain peoples, Paskevich invoked the good of the motherland and forbade Pushkin to remain in active service. “Mr. Pushkin,” he said, “Your life

is precious to Russia, and you have no place here; I therefore advise you to leave the army immediately.” 20 Pushkin left the army, but he was already sufficiently enriched by memories to produce the magisterial vision of the Caucasus that congealed into the Russian (and then Western—since Western interpretations of Russian Romantic literature followed the cues of Russian writers and critics) literary image of the Caucasus. From his early poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” to the mature Journey to Arzrum during the 1829 Campaign [Puteshestvie v Arzrum vo vremia pokhoda 1829 goda], Pushkin set out to create a mute and intellectually deficient Caucasus, recklessly brave in its pointless struggle and ripe for Russian governance 21 Pushkin and Lermontov manufactured for the Russian textual memory the image of Russia as a stem but just mistress of the area. Pushkin in particular can be credited with the first fully successful artistic formulation of Russian imperial consciousness. He gave a voice to those who felt invigorated by Russia’s military achievements. Through Pushkin’s poetry and prose, it rapidly became clear that Russian imperialism did not need a coarse and brutal visage, that Russians were not Mongols, and that they could convert into beauty what their rifles and swords destroyed. The gracefulness with which Pushkin created the consolidating vision of Russian imperialism has served the nation well. He conjured up an image that had never before existed in Russian literature: a proud Russia destined to rule over the “miserable Finns” and other races it had conquered; a Russia replete with humble and admirable patriots who discharged their duty faithfully in the faraway Caucasus; a Russia whose upper classes equaled in sophistication and education the most refined circles in the West. Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum presents the military venture of Field Marshal Paskevich as a kind of merry and unending hunt, where the game is always abundant and the “enemy” (“ I’ennemi in the Frenchlanguage conversation between Pushkin and Paskevich) is always there to be pursued in a light-hearted way. The naturalness of this

pursuit, like getting up and taking a bath and having breakfast, is particularly prominent in the commentary sections of the travelogue. The Other is familiar, a part of our lives, but he or she is there to be pursued, maimed, taken prisoner, killed. The eye-catching similarity to the hunt, and the atmosphere of male distraction, in Pushkin’s account—a total absence of reflection on the humanity of the “enemy” and even a dubious justification for using the “hunt” as a background for the comments of the superior observer—set the tone for the later Russian writings about the wars of conquest. 22 The only available English translation diverts the meaning of Pushkin’s journey from military venture to exotic tourism; it does so by toning down the pugnacious tone of the text and by failing to translate the title in full. In Russian, the title adds to “Journey to Arzrum” the phrase “during the military campaign of 1829,” an addition that places this work squarely within the tradition of military memoirs of the epoch. Unlike Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, who wanders disoriented about the battlefield of Borodino, Pushkin was not an observer but a participant in war, and the refreshment course he took at Arzrum clearly met with his approval. A self-portrait in charcoal that he drew at that time shows him on horseback with his spear [sic] at the ready. 23 But the translation emphasizes instead the traditional readings of Russian literature, which elbow out the military aspect of Russian texts. The reality of total war seeps through Pushkin’s patronizing images. There was hardly a civilian community of Russians in the Caucasus in Pushkin’s time. In towns such as Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, and Tiflis there lived, of course, Russian colonial administrators with their wives and households, and that made for a beginning of a local “society,” but social gatherings were mostly attended by the largest and most visible group of Russians in situ: ensigns, lieutenants, captains, and colonels, with an occasional general as a focus of attention. These social gatherings were a subset of Russian military life, a fact that the readers of Russian literature have consistently disregarded, just as the readers of English literature have ignored the implications of Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation in the West

Indies, or Messrs. Micawber’s and Peggotty’s good fortunes in Australia. While the Russian parties and conversations are thus foregrounded, an impenetrable silence surrounds the lives of native inhabitants. Probably very few readers of Pushkin’s charming description of a trip to Tiflis have noted that the massive presence of beggars in the streets of that city might have been related to the continuous state of war that had existed in the Caucasus ever since the Russian Empire decided that it would be in its interest to conquer the area. Pushkin’s Journey is replete with imperial pedagogy suggesting that Russia is a benevolent agent bestowing order and identity on primeval chaos. At some point, a detachment of soldiers goes to the forest to “cleanse it.” 24 . The cleansing metaphor recurs in Orientalist literature dealing with the colonies; one could mention Rudyard Kipling’s poem “A Song of the White Men” (1899), where the said men “go to clean the land.” (If Pushkin had been a contemporary of Kipling, he could well have repeated after him: “Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread / Their highway side by side!”) 25 Some five hundred “Turkish” prisoners wait nearby showing no signs of fear, even though within sight the Cossacks are finishing off some of the wounded: it is suggested, however, that this is not so much courage as silent indifference. Circassian bodies lie everywhere. A brave Russian colonel smokes “their” pipe “in a friendly way” ( druzhe liubno). The inferior nature of the Turks is suggested by the mention of a “hermaphrodite among them: we are told that such monsters appear frequently among nomads. Before departing for Russia, the poet visits a bazaar and is confronted by “a horrible beggar. He was as pale as death; from his red festered eyes tears were streaming.” The poet “pushes the beggar away with a feeling of repugnance that is impossible to describe” and returns home. One is reminded here of Gustave Flaubert’s graphic descriptions of the revolting medical conditions he witnessed in the Near East. 26

This unattractive picture is contrasted with the healthy and merry Cossacks who, pressing forward after the battle, encounter villages entirely devoid of the Turks, who have, well, disappeared. The Turks who do appear in the story are either humble servants of the Russians or have just been defeated and wait sullenly for the inevitable. A few crazy fellows shoot at the Russians but do not cause much damage. Their undignified and cowardly behavior in the streets contrasts with the “wise and cordial” (Sukhorukov) or “brave” (Burtsov) demeanor of the victors. 27 Pushkin quotes a Turkish poem comparing the pious (and therefore presumably invincible) Arzrum to Istanbul, which is doomed to fall because it does not observe the strictures of the Qu’ran. The author of that poem turns out to be wrong. Arzrum falls to the Russians. The upcoming attack on Arzrum is announced by the commander in chief of the Russian army. General Paskevich, at a dinner for his senior officers. The Muslim stronghold is taken almost casually, with little planning and small expenditure of military force. The tag of invincibility, tossed out casually by Pushkin in a quotation from a hostile poem, returns to the colonial power in full glory. After the conquest, Arzrum is silent; in this city of one hundred thousand, no one complains about the ten thousand Cossacks who are now in charge. The pasha s palace is looted thoroughly: sofas are tom, and there are no carpets. Pushkin suggests that the fleeing Turks themselves had caused the damage. The harem wives praise the Russians when ordered to confront them in person. This Engendering Empire 63 bucolic image is marred by the news that the plague had made its appearance in Arzrum. On his way back to Russia proper, Pushkin encounters friends who take advantage of the local hot springs to treat wounds incurred during the campaign; they carry with them some Russian magazines with inept articles about Pushkin’s poetry. The last event described in

the Journey is an outburst of laughter over these poor samples of literary criticism. The close of Pushkin’s travelogue rehearses the key elements of colonial superiority: abundant literacy, revulsion at the sight of the primitives whose customs are inferior, an ability to use the resources of the conquered lands for a good purpose (the healing of wounds, the building of new houses and parks), an ability to produce texts that would create a memory of the Arzrum campaign for the descendants of those who conquered it, and, finally, an ability to experience the joy of life as befits young Russian officers on leave. Privileging the point of view of the imperial observer is a common strategy of textual imperialism: the pen of the conqueror describes customs and ways of the silent subalterns. Even when a member of the conquering race himself becomes a prisoner of the “primitives,” the situation does not change. In “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” a nameless Russian (called “a European” by the poet) is taken prisoner by the Circassians. He “watches their beliefs and customs” very much as an Orientalist engaged in the business of increasing the Western body of knowledge might have done. 28 He likes their simplicity, hospitality, and nimble movements; he even likes their inclination to quarrel and their psychological strength. Their colorful clothing attracts his attention. The Circassians are “bom for war,” and during their warlike games they often cut off the heads of prisoners to the intense joy of Circassian infants [sic]. The Russian looks at these occupations with the dignity of a superior man, an attitude that evokes the fearful admiration of his jailers. It is characteristic of Russian colonial literature to emphasize the real or alleged brutalities the conquered once imposed on the Russians. Past injustices are celebrated in literary and other texts, giving birth to justifications of like treatment meted out by the Russians. Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” reminds the reader that the unruly tribes of the Caucasus constituted a grave danger to the empire and that many Russians had perished in their raids on imperial territory. In September 1998, three years after the end of a war that leveled the tiny republic of Chechnya and killed tens of

thousands of Chechens, the Russian Presidential Commission on Prisoners Qf War declared in a press release that 794 Russians who had participated in that war were still missing; it demanded an accounting from the devastated republic. Shortly afterwards, Russian foreign ministry announced that Russia would never allow Chechnya to secede from the Russian Federation. 29 Pushkin’s narrowly focused and judgmental writings differ in a profound way from Joseph Conrad’s polyphonic descriptions of black Africa and from Jane Austen’s suppressed criticism of colonial advantage. 30 Unlike the Britons, Push kin has no doubts. He speaks for an empire in the making, one that relies on Cossack sabers rather than on textual superiority, an empire that is still fearful of being enveloped in the Other’s discourse. In Pushkin’s time it was not yet certain that Russia would succeed in overcoming the West’s taxonomizing gaze. Powerful voices, such as those of Jules Michelet, were still ready to treat Russia in ways not dissimilar from those adopted by Pushkin in regard to the Caucasus. The danger was real: long after Pushkin went to his grave, Ivan Turgenev could not avoid the patronizing tone of the Goncourt brothers who commemorated him in their Journal as an exotic and quaint Slavic figure. The rubbing-in of the Caucasus inferiority in Journey to Arzrum, the shrill proclamations of superiority of the Russian Cossacks, and the belittling of the “Turks” said to withdraw without fighting at the slightest provocation were Pushkin’s ways of responding to the high-handedness with which some European intellectuals treated Russians in Pushkin’s time. Several generations later, Lev Tolstoi’s “Hadji Murad” (1904), written from the perspective of a much more secure Russian state, deconstructed the empire’s Romantic propagandists. Tolstoi recorded for the first time the scorched-earth policy that had been the foundation of Ermolov’s and Paskevich’s successes. Even though “Hadji Murad” was written at a time when the Caucasus was firmly anchored in the empire, Tolstoi’s work was published only posthumously. Tolstoi was too anticolonial not to present a danger to

the Russian establishment. His treatment of Tsar Nicholas I, under whose rule the conquest of the Caucasus was completed, is so devastating that it cannot be compared to any work of Russian literature before or after. Hadji Murad” contains macabre vignettes of the war of conquest. The narrator outlines the destruction of a Chechen village in the following way: [Sado] found his saklya in ruins—the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. . . . The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt. . . . The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way . 31 Tolstoi’s translator, Aylmer Maude, described Ermolov’s doings thus: “[A] campaign of pacification of Chechnya and Dagestan . . . consisted of the destruction of villages, theft of cattle and goods, clear-cutting of forests, and the resettlement of the people. 32 Such assessments stand in stark contrast to the lighthearted tone of Journey to Arzrum and even to the murkier narratives of Mikhail Lermontov. Pushkin did, of course, know of the true state of affairs during his Arzrum adventure. “The Circassians hate us,” he admitted, “We have forced them out of their free and spacious pasturelands; their auls are in ruins, whole tribes have been annihilated.” 33 In contrast to Tolstoi, however, he was not pleading the Circassian case but rather warning the Russians of Circassian danger. Like all too many colonialists, Pushkin treated the Other as an alien species whose needs and rights were fundamentally different from those of the conquering tribe. Foremost among the strategies of subjugation and “cutting down to size” is the creation of a dichotomy between the uncouth and disorderly savagery of the Caucasus before the conquest and the improved social and material practices afterwards. Pushkin painted a

rosy picture of the advantages that Russian civilization had bestowed on the Caucasus in just a few years. Comparing the hot springs near Georgievsk to what he had seen a few years earlier, he noted a striking change for the better: In my time the baths were in hastily built shacks. . . . Now magnificent baths and buildings have been erected. A boulevard lined by young lindens runs along the slope of Mount Mashuk. Everywhere there are neatly kept pathways, green benches, rectangular flowerbeds, little bridges, pavilions. The springs have been refined, lined with stone; nailed up on the walls of the bathhouses are lists of instructions from the police; everything is orderly, neat, prettified . 34 The “Turks” are not capable of providing creature comforts; it took the Russians to bring them in. “Asian poverty” has appropriately become a set expression, remarks Pushkin. 35 Mikhail Lermontov, Pushkin’s junior by fifteen years and a Caucasus habitue, makes the Russian characters in The Hero of Our Time (1840) call the “Asiatics” ( aziaty ) “beasts” ( bestii ), “exceedingly stupid” (preglupye), “pitiful” ( zhalkie ), “swindlers” (pluty ), and creatures who are unable to take care of themselves. 36 They are also treacherous and greedy: Bela’s brother betrays her for a horse (whom Pechorin would steal from Kazbich, an action that is presented as disquieting but at the same time indicative of Pechorin’s courage and prowess). Native poverty is described in such a way as to suggest the natives’ inability ever to rise above the subsistence level: they hunt, they plant some grain, they quarrel with each other and steal horses. Characteristically, Maksim Maksimych, himself no intellectual giant, makes a particularly harsh pronouncement about the mental limitations of “natives.” Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s natives are scattered around like annoying monkeys in an awe-inspiring landscape. They are there to keep the Russian soldiers busy and to cement the reader’s solidarity with Rus'. Unlike Pushkin’s and somewhat like Joseph Conrad’s, however, Lermontov’s comments contain a trace of irony; Lermontov

had been bom into an empire that could already affort some generosity. Still, a concatenation of belittling attributes reported by a broad range of personalities provide the Russian readers a suggestion that these primitives require and beseech domination. Then, wrapping it all together, are culture and war, morality and advice: “[Wjhere the sullen pasha used to smoke silently among his wives and shameless boys, his vanquisher was receiving reports on the victories of his generals, distributing pashalics, and discussing new novels.” 37 Like the works of Western colonialists, Puteshestvie v Arzrum displays an inability to entertain the thought that the natives were not necessarily wicked in their refusal to submit to the conquerors. Pushkin remarks that on several occasions he demanded accommodation or horses from the local inhabitants, taking it for granted that he should be served by the local population just because the Russian army was there to back him up. He extended these demands to officials and civilians in the towns and settlement he visited, and they were always met. What the local folk must have thought of him remains unsaid—and most likely unthought by the readers. In a classical imperialist description of the conquered lands, Pushkin wrote the following of Georgia and its inhabitants, “Georgia came under Emperor Alexander’s sceptre in 1792. The Georgians are a warlike people. They have proved their bravery under our banners. Their intellectual capabilities await further development. On the whole they are of a happy and sociable disposition.” 38 The newly subjugated city of Arzrum did not offer enough creature comforts to satisfy Pushkin’s taste. The goods that he wished to obtain were not readily available in shops. This became an occasion for boasting: “I know of no expression more nonsensical than the words: Asian luxury . . . Asian poverty, Asian swinishness, etc., but luxury is, of course, an attribute of Europe. In Arzrunf you cannot buy for any money what you can find in a general store in any district town of the Pskov province.” 39

Pskov was a cleverly chosen example: it was close enough to the empire’s Baltic rim, which was among the most prosperous of Russia’s contiguous colonies. Pushkin’s example conceals the state of affairs in the Russian heartland, so evocatively described by Gogol 1 at approximately the same time, while casually reinforcing Russia’s image as just another refined European country. Such texts seared in Russian memory an image of the Caucasus as a land in need of tutelage, and they immunized Russians against the intrusion of sympathy and understanding toward its peoples. The expenditure of the energies of small nations to guard against Russian attacks, energy that could have been used instead for society building, became a nonproblem for the readers of Russian literature. Texts like Pushkin’s Journey are not unrelated to the stupendous indifference and sense of hostile superiority with which the Muscovites in the post-Soviet period have treated the dark-skinned folk of the southern regions of the former USSR arriving in Moscow. The hostility showed in the opinion polls of the 1990s, polls that also revealed a popular conviction that the “Chechen mafia” robs the Muscovites of their well-deserved patrimony of security. 40 The foundation for such perceptions was laid in the presentation of “natives” in Russian Romantic literature. Puteshestvie v Arzrum was prompted by a French account of another colonial journey. What spurred on the Russian writer was an allegation in the French travelogue that he, Pushkin, had satirized the Arzrum military campaign in his writings. Nothing could be farther from the truth, contended the poet, and indeed his work is replete with attempts to bestow benign meanings on Russia’s military violence. Pushkin seemed to entertain no doubts about the moral legitimacy of taking away land from those who were weaker, whether they were Caucasians or Central Europeans, as long as the land accrued to the Russians or their allies (he was opposed to Turkish imperialism, writing passionate poems in defense of the Serbs, who were victims of the Ottoman empire’s greed for land). Of all the great Russian writers, Pushkin was probably the crudest jingoist.

In his early stories, Lev Tolstoi added to the Pushkinesque vision of the brave Cossacks fighting for the empire, but he was later much chastened by his own difficult life, and his late stories reflect a new understanding of Russian expansionism. The narrator in “Hadji Murad” says the following about the situation in a Chechen village after a Russian raid: No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them —like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves—was as natural an instinct as that of selfpreservation . 41 However, it was not Tolstoi but a German aristocrat, Baron August von Haxthausen, who, traveling in Russia at the expense of Tsar Nicholas I, provided a blueprint for the subsequent foreign perceptions of Russia’s “voyage in”: Having maintained that Russia’s policy with respect to Asia has been peaceful rather than aggressive, we would like to demonstrate this in detail. Let us begin at that point where Russia has continually waged war, namely, in the Caucasian provinces. The Caucasian mountain range in its entire length faces the Russian plains. The warlike and rapacious highlanders had always swooped down on the unprotected plains, pillaging and ravaging the countryside and then withdrawing unpunished to their safe mountain fortresses. It was nearly impossible to launch a frontal attack against them, because they had all of Asia behind them. Then Russia acquired Georgia. It was a great burden and embroiled Russia in sanguinary wars with Persia and Turkey, which led to the conquest of the entire region south of the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas . 42 r

Haxthausen then adds defen'sivdly, “This conquest took place before the accession of the present emperor. He had to accept the inheritance. But he staunchly supports the idea of Russia’s “civilizing mission” and appeals to the cultivated reader’s sense of international law and order. After such authority, reinforced by other authoritative texts and by journalistic discourse, is a correction possible? If one were to believe Angela Stent, Daniel Yergin, and Thane Gustafson, co-authors of Russia 2010 (1995), probably not. In a chapter titled “The Return of a Great Power,” the authors admit imperial overreach only in regard to Afghanistan; they predict that “the north Caucasus will be a sore for years to come, while the central government in Moscow remains weak, but in the long run the region is likely to remain Russian.” 43 During these wars of conquest, the area’s economic potential was intimated by the mysterious lights that erupted around the city of Baku at night. They were caused by gas from the oil and gas-rich fields around the city, escaping and then igniting. An early awareness of the possible use of these resources might have contributed to the readiness to expand in the direction of this mountainous region, whose inhabitants, divided among themselves by religion and ethnic background, did not constitute a serious threat to the empire. The decision to expand showed much foresight. In the early twentieth century, all Russian oil output came from two Caucasus colonies, Azerbaijan and Chechnya. In 1913, the Russian empire produced 561 million poods (ten million tons) of petroleum, fourfifths of which came from wells near Baku and one fifth from wells near the Chechen city of Groznyi. 44 It was to a Caucasus pacified by Ermolov that the young Russian poet Lermontov was sent by a court order in 1837. Pardoned in 1838, he was arrested again for fighting a duel with a foreign diplomat’s son and was dispatched back to the Caucasus. The empire’s housekeeping system provided useful occupations to native

sons who trespassed against the tsar’s will. Lermontov’s task was to help in yet another pacification. The Hero of Our Time [Geroi nashego vremeni ] (1840) was a fruit of Lermontov s two involuntary visits to the region. Owing to this circumstance and to his Romantic dislike of tsarist tyranny, Lermontov advanced somewhat beyond Pushkin’s interpretation of the behavior of Russians, although he remained insensitive to the issue of subjugation. His tale revolves around a melancholy Russian ensign named Pechorin, a hapless victim of his own sadomasochistic proclivities, and an old fellow officer Maksim Maksimych, who had dedicated his life to the empire. The natives form a background of greed and treachery (Azamat), stupidity (the old Circassian prince), and untidiness (Kazbich). Thenwomen are far from pretty, to Pechorin’s taste; one exception is Bela. A princess by birth, she is never so called by the good Maksim Maksimych, however, and when she is taken prisoner her dignity and inviolability disappear in no time. The narrator presents her as an illiterate Circassian girl, almost asking to be captured, raped, kept for the amusement of her superior master Pechorin, and then cast aside. But the somber sequence of events is not obscured by the narrator’s rhetoric, and readers are able to come to their own conclusions about the worthiness of the “hero of our time.” While many Russian readers took a skeptical stance, their disapproval of Pechorin centered around his lack of goals in life rather than the more specific crime of having raped an underage, non-Russian girl and destroyed her family. As Lermontov put it, his goal was to write “the history of a human soul.” He was not interested in the morality of rape and conquest but rather in the place Pechorin and his like occupied in Russian affairs. Circassian society in the story is atomized by the defeat, but the authoritative voice of an outside observer suggests that the natives suffer from bad luck, partly in that they are unable to form significant social ties that would enable them to defend themselves better. They communicate poorly with one another. Kazbich kills the old prince in a mistaken belief that he had sold his daughter Bela to Pechorin.

Compelled to lead the life of an outlaw, Kazbich fails to marry, start a family, or occupy a respectable place in the Circassian society, the place to which his skills would have entitled him had the Russians not plotted the destruction of his people. Bela dies as a result of a misunderstanding and of Kazbich’s vengeful ways. The thoughts of the natives are not presented directly but are always interpreted by a Russian character. Lermontov’s attitude in that regard is a fascimile of Pushkin’s. Let us return for a moment to Journey to Arzrum. It contains an episode in which Russian generals confront four captured pashas (Muslim princes), one of whom considers himself a poet. As seen by the Russian observer, the poetic pasha is garrulous and undignified, characteristics that put him several notches below a “real” Romantic poet such as Pushkin himself. The poet who, we are told, is an old man (and whose life— although we are not told that—hangs by a thread, at the whim of the Russian officers present) delivers a tragicomic oration: “Blessed be the hour when we meet a poet. The poet is brother to the dervish. He has neither a fatherland, nor earthly blessings; and while we, poor ones, worry about glory, about power, about treasures, he stands equal with the rulers of the earth and they bow to him.” 45 The assembled company is amused. The Asians are allowed to wax poetic (of course they are not “real” poets, merely clowns), because this keeps them away from mischief, that is, from active struggle against Russia. But of course they cannot be allowed to frolic too much; having satisfied the company’s need for entertainment, they have to clear out. The dervish who appears after the pasha’s oration is brutally pushed away, and we hear no more about the pasha’s fate. It is this deep rift between the serious concern with which the Russians are portrayed and the bemused superiority characterizing sketches of “natives” that makes of Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s fine works examples of colonialist lore. The Russians are comprehensible and fully human, whereas the alien Circassians resemble the Snake Charmer in the famous portrait of Jean Leon Gerome that is featured on the cover page of the first edition of

Edward Said’s Orientalism. This technique belittles the conquered. The cunning garrulousness of the old pasha is taken to be an outburst of naive, savagery rather than a calculated attempt to distract the captors, while Bela’s behavior in captivity corresponds to the stereotype of tribal women swayed by colorful beads and sweet words. In his essay “The Other Question,” Homi Bhabha compares the dependence of the colonialist on stereotypes of the “natives” to Freud’s conception of the role the fetish plays in regard to the fetishist. 46 Somehow the colonizer defines himself “in contrast to,” and therefore “in dependence on,” the “savages.” He defines him or herself in terms of what he or she is not. Thus his identity proves more fragile than might have been assumed. The repeated juxtapositions of natives and Russians in the “Caucasian” works of Pushkin and Lermontov suggest the presence of uncertainty and anxiety in colonialist discourse. Far from being sure of his standing vis-a-vis the conquered, the Russian writers display a pressing need to reassert their Russian identity and thus their power over the Other. But that identity amounts to a lack, a shortage, if and when the Other is absent, thus fracturing the ostensible self-assurance of the conqueror. Witold Gombrowicz hinted at a similar relationship in his novel Ferdydurke (1937), where he spoke of masters scrupulously observing table manners because servants were present—eating their dinner in effect against the servants as it were, in order to show them that they, the noble landowners, are better and more refined than peasants. 47 But, observed Gombrowicz, the very fact that they thus depended on servants for the construction of their identity undermined the identity they sought. It made the relationship between the masters’ superiority and the servants’ inferiority unstable, sordid, and easy to deconstruct. It appears that such an unstable relationship lies at the very heart of colonialist attitudes, whether the stage is British India or the Russian Caucasus.

A sign of trivialization of the Caucasus in Russian literature is the shallowness of attachments to itself that it engenders in the Russian characters. The Caucasus generates no vital ties and no loyalty to itself, so far as the Russians are concerned. It serves only as an ornament, like the conventional landscapes against which Renaissance painters placed their female models. It is disposable, like a vacation overseas. The psychological portrayal of the two Russian heroes in Lermontov’s novel might have had St. Petersburg or Moscow for background: nothing in their inner development is significantly related to the area in which they live. It is as if the native peoples and histories did not exist, or existed only to create for the Russians the task of managing them. What really matters are the Russian lands to which Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s narrators return; they are the subject of Maksim Maksimych’s fond dreams. Pechorin’s habits and views derive from urban education and are unrelated to the Circassians and their concerns. He does not learn anything from them. Small wonder that Pechorin has been compartmentalized by literary historians with other urban Russian characters, Eugene Onegin and Aleksandr Chatskii, who have no relation to the Caucasus either and indeed belong to that small segment of Russian male society that did not participate in wars. As in other colonial literatures, the Russian heroes in the Caucasus speak to each other but not to the natives; they speak about the natives, but they do not conduct conversations with them, as Gayatri Spivak might have said. 48 Lermontov’s tale generated a great deal of commentary, and it occasioned some generalizations about the state of Russian literature, but it did not initiate any significant discussion about the history of the Caucasus or the problems of its native inhabitants. With a few exceptions, this dismissive attitude has been maintained until the present time. Not only Pechorin and Maksim Maksimych but also Grushnitskii, Princess Meri, and other Russian visitors to the area have been analyzed and interpreted in countless ways, mostly as representatives of either of two opposing attitudes: that of alienation

(the rootless Pechorin) and that of dedication to the rodina (Maksim Maksimych). It all started with Vissarion Belinskii’s review of The Hero of Our Time written in the same year the novel was published. 49 Belinskii’s began the tradition of removing the “natives” from that existential and literary space which is of interest to critics. Here is what he said about Bela’s death: [The chapter titled] “Bela” leaves a deep impression. It makes you sad, but it is a light-hearted, bright and sweet sadness; your imagination flies away to the grave of this beauty, and the grave is not gloomy: the sun shines on it, a mountain stream cleanses it. The murmur of this stream, together with the rumbling of the wind in the local trees, speaks to you about something mysterious and boundless. Above the grave you see a wonderful apparition, her cheeks snow-white, her dark eyes expressing both reproach and forgiveness, her lips smiling sadly . 50 For Belinskii, Bela’s death provides an occasion to write about the feelings of Russian readers ripe for a philosophical reflection about the signals given to Russians by nature and the passing of events. The native woman is treated instrumentally; her death is seen as a blip on the Russian screen rather than as a major tear in the fabric of the society of which she had been part. She does, of course, forgive her Russian captors, even though she is a Muslim and is not under a religious obligation to forgive. As for Lermontov himself, Belinskii calls him a rebel without a cause, thus further deflecting the attention of Lermontov’s readers from the Caucasus to the problems of Russia’s educated and Westernized elite. The fact that Lermontov participated in an aggressive war is a nonproblem for the Russian critic, otherwise sensitive to social and political injustice. One of Belinskii’s successors, N. A. Dobroliubov, wrote a famous essay on the Russian literary characters whom he dubbed “the superfluous men,” after the title of Turgenev’s story: at the beginning of this chain stand Pechorin and Onegin. Two recent American histories of Russian literature fully sever the already flimsy connection between Lermontov’s work and the bloody conquest of the Caucasus, thus

reconfirming the immunity of Russian literature to postcolonial critique. 51 In line with the cluster of issues from which native problems have been excised, Lermontov tells us that the/e were good and bad Russians in the Caucasus. The gloomy Pechorin is contrasted with a lackluster but kind Maksim Maksimych, a man who can feel the needs of others even before they express them verbally. Maksimych is the predecessor of all the loving fathers and elders of Russian literature, from Bazarov Sr. in Fathers and Sons to Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. But, of course, his empathy is second to his military duty: he is a devotee of Empire, and he never ponders why the Russians needed to subjugate the Caucasus in the first place. While Pechorin is secretive, Mak simych is open and talkative; while Pechorin seeks distraction from his ennui in the embraces of Circassian women, Maksimych thinks with occasional regret of the missed opportunity of a good Russian marriage. Pechorin is young and sophisticated, but Maksimych is old and rustic, a characteristic that has usually resonated positively in Russian literature. Pechorin goads on a silly Circassian teenager until the youngster commits a crime; he rapes Bela and indirectly causes her death, in addition to destroying the family of the alreadysubjugated and already-peaceful chieftain. Maksimych disapproves of all that: should we not extol him as a model of a “good” colonialist? After all, he is also a bednyi starik, a poor old man, whose attachment to Pechorin and Bela is not reciprocated. Perhaps we should; to a reader unaccustomed to postcolonial gaze, it may seem crude and in bad taste to note that Maksimych dedicated his life to killing the inhabitants of the Caucasus. He was a professional soldier, hired by the empire to kill human beings in foreign lands. For all his alienation from the Russian autocratic system, Lermontov lived within the Russian ethos, which was characterized by blindness to the problem of Russian imperialism; his critics and readers have followed suit.

Russian critics speak of Maksim Maksimych in glowing terms. The tradition was set up by, again, Vissarion Belinskii, who declared Maksimych a great Rus-' sian hero. Maksimych remained so under tsars and commissars. The stereotyped images of poor and suffering Russians have been so powerfully and frequently supplied by Russian literature and reinforced by Russian literary criticism that they overshadowed the incomparably poorer and more grievously suffering subalterns. Perhaps the willingness of Western critics to follow Russian cues in this respect is generated not just by “the milk of human kindness,” stirred by the images of Tiutchevian bednye selen'ia (poor villages) inhabited by russkii rnrod (the Russian nation), but also by the imperial splendor with which these rural schlemiels have been associated. Russian colonial history was further elbowed out from the purview of literary criticism by the introduction of the “superfluous man” stereotype. 52 The concept of superfluity was imposed on literary characters of fundamentally different social backgrounds. It was applied to the civilian Oblomov, who spent most of his life as a couch potato, and to Pechorin, whose “scalp collection” was substantial. This mixing of apples and oranges had its own dynamics, which overshadowed the colonial process. Russian literary criticism remained immune to Russian expansionism, and it created a discourse within which raising that issue became difficult. A large number of authoritative works implicitly proclaim that a postcolonial perspective is inconceivable in regard to Russian letters. To return, however, to Lermontov: Bela attracts the reader through the managed exoticism of her background, a frequent device of colonialist travel literature. A victim of abduction and rape by Pechorin, she also experiences the death of her father and her brother’s disappearance. But Bela is no Judith or Jael. In Lermontov’s rendition, she falls in love with her seducer and dies at the hand of her countryman. The stereotype of the Chechens as killers is highlighted in

Bela s murderer Kazbek. One recalls here that in Dostoevskii’s The Idiot, a seduced Russian woman, Nastas'ia Filippovna, comes to hate her seducer and repays him handsomely for her humiliation. One of the convenient myths of the conquerors about the conquered is that native women, in contrast, are humble, obedient, and mindless. Bela is presented as innocent, silly, charming, and after some initial pouting, totally devoted to Pechorin. According to the pattern conceived in the minds of rapists, she loves to be seduced. Besides, she is a savage, as Lermontov amply demonstrates, and so she could not but admire her refined Russian master. One wonders whether Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s story about a Tatar woman, raped by every Russian man she had ever encountered and irreversibly traumatized by these rapes, was in some way an ironic echo of the male fantasy that made Bela cooperate in the process of her humiliation and destruction. Was Pechorin in any way typical of Russian society at that time, or did he owe his literary appearance to his creator’s familiarity with Western Romantic literatures, especially with Lord Byron’s poems? The Russian educational system under Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I had few if any schools in which people like Pechorin could find sustenance. The Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, established in 1811 and famous for its ability to impart refined manners to its pupils, had a student body of only fifty students at any given time. 53 The two Russian universities produced few humanities graduates, and these generally chose civil rather than military service. Nor did the Russian military schools, whose size and quality far surpassed that of the Russian universities, have room for future officers who resembled Pechorin: individualistic, bookish, refined and ill adjusted to the realities of lengthy military campaigns (Pechorin’s snow-white linen shirts belonged in Lermontov’s dream life rather than in the Caucasus wars). During his own stay at the Petersburg Military Academy, Lermontov behaved in ways hardly resembling those of Pechorin. He wrote crude erotic verse and displayed little of Pechorin’s sophisticated ennui. In Lermontov’s Russia, where nonmilitary high school graduates numbered a few thousand and where the system of fourteen ranks was embedded in the social

fabric, people like Pechorin had no place. In the provinces, and certainly on active military duty, the brutality of life was such that anyone of Pechorin’s ilk, if he washed up in the Caucasus, would have had to metamorphose quickly to survive. Thus it appears that Pechorin was indeed a “superfluous” man, but not in the sense in which Dobroliubov conceived of his superfluity. It appears that the writer’s instinct made Lermontov endow Pechorin with a sophistication'ill suited to his occupation in order better to explain Bela’s seduction. Pechorin’s superiority facilitates the imposition of a stereotypical explanation of an inferior native surrendering to a refined master. Pechorin also issued from the author’s refusal to see Russian society as a government-driven throng of nomads on the go whose resources were spent on war rather than on cultural pursuits. The Russians went to the Caucasus to conquer, not to reflect, and the struggle was too intense to allow a Pechorinesque type to function in a kill-or-be-killed milieu. In this sense, Pechorin is a fraudulent char acter, yet he, and certain other characters conjured up by Russian writers of the time, congealed into “history.” In Russian and foreign memory, the Caucasus of the 1820s and 1830s is seen through the eyes of Pushkin and Lermontov rather than through the eyes of Chechens, Lezghins, Balkars, or Nogays. How incongruent that vision of history is with the memories and myths of the native peoples can be gauged by the number of uprisings that the Caucasus peoples have staged since Lermontov’s time. 54 THE RHETORICAL CONTAINMENT OF POLAND Unlike the Caucasus, the acquisition of territory of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795 generated no remarkable works of imaginative literature. There were several reasons for this. The wars with Poland occurred at the time when the transformation of Russian literature had just begun. In eighteenthcentury Russia there were no remarkable periodicals and no writers of genius. Catherine’s censorship was whimsical and seldom reminiscent of the Muscovite terror directed at writings that were

deemed harmful to the state; nevertheless, it was pervasive enough to discourage originality, as Aleksandr Radishchev found out to his intense grief. Another reason was the nature of the* acquisitions. Roman Szporluk has argued that from the Ukrainian standpoint, some parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth exchanged one imperialist, Poland, for another, Russia. Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian territories had a Polish landowning class, a Jewish business class, and a “native” peasant class. But in Russian eyes, these territories were rightfully Russian, because the peasants who lived there were East Slavs who used the Cyrillic alphabet and followed the Byzantine liturgy (the Baltic provinces were an exception). Upon annexation to Russia, the so-called Eastern Rite Catholics (mostly Ruthenians), who joined the Catholic Church in 1596 but retained Byzantine liturgy and other religious customs, had to be reconverted to Eastern Orthodoxy by persuasion or force. Thus the acquisition of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands was not viewed as a conquest but merely as a return of the lands long lost. From that point of view, it would have been improper to view Belarusian peasants the way Lermontov and Pushkin viewed the Caucasus natives. That said, it should also be underscored that Ukraine and Belarus had never been part of Old Muscovy and thus could not be returned to the Russian state. The East Slavic lands west of Muscovy had been wrenched away from the Mongols by the Lithuanians, and they had became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when the Lithuanian prince Jogaila (Jagiello) married the Polish princess Jadwiga. Under Polish rule, Lithuania, western Belarus and western Ukraine had lost their upper classes to Polonization, and in this sense their nationhood had been weakened; nonetheless, they had also gained a chance to sustain an identity separate from the Russians. Their four-hundred-years-long association with Poland did result from Polish colonialism, but it also nurtured the idea that Ukraine was neither Polish nor Russian. Thus the argument made by Catherine’s public relations men, that the partitions of Poland constituted not a conquest but merely a dynastic rearrange

ment, was tenuous. 55 The fraudulence of this official explanation resulted in a lack of encouragement on the part of the state to celebrate the rearrangements too loudly; also, the expropriation of Polish landowners and forcible conversions to Russian Orthodoxy were best kept under wraps. 56 Such were the reasons why hardly any literary works (except for some poetry rejoicing over the capitulation of Polish cities) were written to celebrate the cannibalization of the PolishLithuanian state. Only when the disappearance of Poland from the map of Europe congealed into an accepted political reality did anti-Polish literature begin to appear, usually as a follow-up to Polish risings or other manifestations of Polish identity. The November 1830 rising occasioned a wave of sympathy in Europe and thus had to be countered by Russian voices asserting the illegitimacy of the rising and the righteousness of the empire. The finest representatives of Russian literature reacted angrily to Polish aspirations to independence, as well as to the suggestion expressed by such Polish writers as Adam Mickiewicz and Cyprian Kamil Norwid that Russia had more in common with its former Mongol masters than with its European partners in imperialism. Thus the Polish risings strengthened the Russian imperial consciousness and provided an opportunity for Russian writers to hone their polemical skills. In the 1830s, there appeared literary works that combined high artistic quality with the imperial arrogance that in other colonial societies manifested itself less indirectly, in musings about “the white man’s burden.” In Russia, it was rather a noli me tang ere. However much the Brahmins of India might have disliked or even hated the British, they did not despise them; the Russian colonizer, in contrast, faced the unusual situation of being patronized in some parts of the empire. Granted, some of this originated in the resentment of the defeated, but the scale and pervasiveness of this phenomenon indicate that there was more to it than psychological compensation. 57 The awareness of this unusual relation between the colonizer and the colonized was strong in the nineteenth century; writers such as Pushkin and Dostoevskii felt obliged to lash back at

those who did not show enough respect for the Russian empire. This anger and pride were heard in the West, but the underlying causes were grossly misinterpreted. Ernest Simmons’s commentary on Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” [“Klevetnikam Rossii”] set the tone for the next two generations of interpreters. Simmons saw in Pushkin’s anger “a reactionary tendency” and “a flaming patriotism.” 58 Note a total deflection of attention from a possible inferiority complex. While the feeling of superiority over the Russians displayed by the Baltic and Polish elites escaped the West’s attention, because it seemed too absurd to be taken seriously (or perhaps because the phenomenon was so alien to Western sensibilities), the Russians did take note of it, and they reciprocated with the particularly harsh measures against the defeated but cheeky subalterns. It must have been emotionally taxing for the colonizer to endure the manifestations of scorn in Russian-occupied Warsaw, where the best Polish families shunned social contact, let alone marriage, with the Russians. When Pushkin upbraided “the slanderers of Russia” for questioning the empire’s civilizational mission, he displayed imperial pride honeycombed with an inability of a nouveau-riche to take criticism in stride. Pushkin’s angry tone in such poems as “To the Slanderers of Russia,” “The Borodino Anniversary” [“Borodinskaia godovshchina”] and The Bronze Horseman was thus generated by a set of circumstances that find no parallel in Western colonialism. There, attacks on imperial possessiveness from the point of view of the cultural superiority of the defeated did not occur on a large scale. In the nineteenth century, the West was conscious of, and confident in, its cultural and technological might, and there was no conceivable direction from which a questioning of its achievements could have come. Not so in Russia, where in spite of the unprecedented military, diplomatic, and cultural successes the imperial image was still fragile and wobbly.

Such was the background. The front of the stage featured pride and confidence, and that breathtaking eloquence often engendered by them. In his “colonialist” poems, the annoyed Pushkin insisted that Russia’s destiny was to lord it over nations and tribes of lesser might. He realized that Poles in particular were beneficiaries of teaand-sympathy support in the West after the insurrection of 1830,. and his raw imperial nerve responded with an outburst of creativity. His antiPolish poems first appeared in a brochure titled The Taking of Warsaw, published in September 1831, immediately after Warsaw fell to Field Marshal Paskevich’s army. It was the same Paskevich who took over from Ermolov in the Caucasus. “To the Slanderers of Russia” takes to task Western sympathizers of the Polish rising, such as the popular French poet Casimir Delavigne and the authors of the Polenlieder in Germany. 59 Haughtily, the speaker informs them that the contest between the two nations is over, and that Lithuania had lost (note the poet’s unwillingness to mention Poland). Those who tried to change the verdict of history should be swept away. In a tone reminiscent of the introduction to The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin conjures up the empire’s greatness. He informs the reader that Russians had bought with their own blood Europe’s freedom, honor and peace.” He also threatens Europe (“Need we start to quarrel with Europe again? Have Russians become unaccustomed to victory? Or perhaps we are not numerous enough? . . . From Finland to Asia Minor, from the Kremlin to China, Russia will rise and its steel armor will shine.”). Note the confusion between ethnic Russia and its colonies: Pushkin’s poem threatens the West in a way reminiscent of Aleksandr Blok’s “The Scythians,” written almost a century later. By comparison to such poems, Kipling’s self-confident verse appears to have been written by a paragon of modesty. Pushkin tauntingly invites Europe to attack Russia so that its armies may find their death in the vastness of the East, just as Napoleon’s soldiers did (“among graves not entirely unfamiliar to them,” sredi nechuzhdykh im grobov). Russian literature had known tsarist anger before, starting with Ivan the Terrible’s Letters to Prince Kurbskii (their authenticity has been questioned, however), and adulatory invocations of Russia and her

tsars and tsarinas had appeared in the works of Denis Fonvizin, Gavriil Derzhavin, and other eighteenth-century literati. But the tone of a wrathful Russian lord threatening the European opponents of the Russian enterprise had not been heard before. Pushkin’s passion for the imperium resembles that of his contemporary, Mikhail Glinka, whose opera Life for the Tsar interprets history as a conspiracy of Poles and other Westerners to throttle Muscovite Russia. 60 The libretto, by Glinka s cousin, employs the device of accusing the conquered people of having plotted against Russia at a time when they were free, perhaps with a view to justifying the massacres of them during and after the conquest. In Shakespeare’s words, “So full of artless jealousy is guilt / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” Glinka’s opera was first staged in 1836, four years after the Polish rising was over, and it was dusted off in the period of Soviet-Nazi friendship. Tiutchev’s anti-Polish poetry was occasioned by the 1863 rising. Similar tendencies can be perceived in regard to other colonized nations. In 1939—41, campaigns of vilification of the Baltic peoples and of Romanians were undertaken in the Soviet Russian press just before and during the time when these nations were exposed to arrests and deportations by the NKVD. 61 All empires resemble one another: “The Borodino Anniversary” rejoices over “the sweet hour of victory” over Europe, and it mocks the alleged desire of Warsaw “to dictate its proud laws” to the unidentified “slanderers of Russia.” But “the fate of Poland has been sealed,” asserts Pushkin. In this poem, Poland is ambiguously equated with the entire Europe (“The entire Europe [vria Evropa ] tried to conquer us,” Pushkin alleges in the first stanza of the poem). Just as Glinka helped create in the minds of Russians the myth of a powerful and malignant Polish invasion, so did Pushkin provide the interpretation, which subsequently grew into certainty in the Russian popular consciousness, that the 1812 French invasion had almost crushed European civilization and that this had been reversed by Russia. This exaggerated notion of Russia’s role in European affairs was a by-product of imperial consciousness as it developed during

Pushkin’s lifetime. It turned out to have a long half-life. 62 The Moscow historian P. M. Miliukov coined a sarcastic neologism, “Aziopa,” with reference to such boasts as compared to the actual state of affairs in the Russian empire. The vagueness of distinction between ethnic Russia and the empire has plagued Russian literature and self-perception ever since Pushkin’s introduction of semantic liberties, while the fear that vsia Evropa is out to destroy Russia has become a “default mode” into which Russian political consciousness locks itself in times of crisis. 63 The most magnificent expression of Russian imperial pride is the prologue to The Bronze Horseman [Mednyi Vsadnik ] (1833). The poem is so artistically successful that its colonialist tone and its gilding of history have largely escaped attention: critics might have considered it tactless to seize upon the poem’s factual inaccuracies, in view of its resonant artistry. It is indeed one of the finest poems in the Russian language. But it also has a less attractive dimension. Pe ter’s military prowess and ability to plan ahead ( i v dal' gladel) are contrasted here with the “miserable Finns” ( ubogie chukhontsy), who proved unable to generate long-term designs on other people’s land and who languished in their “huts” until a powerful Russian hand wiped them out. The Finns’s huts are squatty, whereas Peter stands erect; their “skiffs” are “solitary”, whereas Peter has already created the Admiralty. What is juxtaposed here is, in fact, a lifestyle that minds its own business, builds “huts,” and bears itself somewhat passively, with a lifestyle that is not satisfied with what is, or what it already possesses, and strives to acquire more at other people’s expense. As Edward Said might say, this is imperialism at its purest: Peter’s right to destroy the Finnish way of life is taken for granted. After the Finns, Peter wished to take on the Swedes ( otsel' grozit' my budem shvedu). In Pushkin’s rendition, Peter does not want to “construct” a window to Europe, he wants to “hack through” an opening: the Russian verb prorubit' connotes violent action. The prologue is Nietzschean avant la lettre. It dismisses the laborious building of civilization by a human community and extols

quick change brought about by the will of superior men: I love you, Peter’s creation, I love your severe, graceful appearance .... City of Peter, stand in all your magnificence, Be unshakeable as Russia! May the conquered currents, too, Make their peace with you; Let the Finnish waves Forget their ancient hostility, And not disturb with their vain rancor Peter’s everlasting sleep! 64 The poem itself promotes hero worship in the Carlylean sense, and it also makes clear that Peter’s ultimate goal was not his own glory but Russia’s. The glory of a nation is conceived here solely in terms of an ability to outshine and outpower others: Lenin’s kto kogo (who whom) is perilously close to Pushkin’s evocation of the might of Peter. Power is the ultimate subject matter of this poem; it is glorified here for its own sake. Among the footnotes to the poem provided by Pushkin, there is one referring to the description of St. Petersburg by Adam Mickiewicz, Pushkin’s onetime acquaintance. Aware perhaps that few readers would have an opportunity to read this Polish poet, Pushkin confidently suggests that Mickiewicz also wrote a description of the city, titled “Oleszkiewicz,” that he supplied the details omitted by Pushkin, and that Mickiewicz had in turn borrowed his description from a minor eighteenth-century poet, V. G. Ruban. 65 Pushkin here unwittingly or deliberately misled his readers. “Oleszkiewicz” is a fragment of a cycle of passionate poems about St. Petersburg that Mickiewicz wrote in 1832 and titled “Ust?p” (“A Digression”). There is no mention of Ru

ban there, but there is a friendly comment about K. F. Ryleev, a leader of the Decembrists hanged by order of Tsar Nicholas I after their failed rising. In these poems, or rather jeremiads, Mickiewicz paints a devastating picture of St. Petersburg and its inhabitants. He compares the city to a Zoo filled with species of architecture alien to the culture that captured them. Everything in that city is borrowed or bought for the money Russians managed to steal from others nations, laments Mickiewicz, and the city is steeped in a chilling atmosphere of autocracy and fear. Peter with a chain closed up each Russian port. He formed a senate; he established spies, Passports, and ranks. so that Europe cried, surprised: “Tsar Peter has made Russia civilized!” All that remained for later tsars’ desires Was to hint lies to venal cabinets, To succor despots with new bayonets, To enter foreign lands on plunder bent, To pay their foreign guests a stolen fee And win applause in France and Germany .” 66 As to Peter’s monument, Mickiewicz compares it to the monuments of other prominent leaders of nations, and Peter does not look good by comparison. In contrast to such emperors as Marcus Aurelius, who extended his hand benevolently to the people whom he ruled and whose horse stood quietly with his legs on the ground, Peter is ready to charge forward, his horse maddened by pain inflicted by the rider; he is ready to trample on whatever is in front of him. A people ruled by this kind of emperor is afraid of him; he, not a foreign

enemy, represents the danger—he can trample down on their lives and property. Mickiewicz’s reflections here seem to prophesy the Khodynka, a field where several thousand people were to be trampled to death during the celebrations accompanying the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. One of the poems in Mickiewicz’s “Digression” ends with a stately metaphor of a gate, a moat, and a bridge leading to the “prison” of St. Petersburg. The ability of Poles to produce rejoinders of this kind helped generate a deep dislike of this nation among the Russian imperial elites. Vissarion Belinskii’s pigeonholing of the superfluous man proved lasting, and it crowded out other possible interpretations of the characters created by Pushkin and Lermontov, such as the ones suggested in this chapter. The theme of a man alienated from society and bitter in his disappointment was picked up by Dobroliubov, Chemyshevskii, Goncharov, and finally by Soviet Russian critics. The connection between the superfluous man and Empire faded away from view. The detour of Formalism that Soviet literary criticism took in the 1920s did not change the focus of attention in this respect. B. M. Eikhenbaum’s study of Ler montov shows that Formalism did not introduce any corrections to this Empirefriendly interpretation. 67 Overshadowed by the superfluous man who was Pechorin, the Circassians and their fate remained invisible even to the radical Formalist critics. The Poles likewise faded from view, to be revived as enemies of the state during the period of Soviet-Nazi friendship. The colonialist aspect of the Russian assaults on others was dropped into the memory hole. Furthermore, while the Caucasus had been treated as “ours” ( nash ) in Russian literary history ever since the time of Pushkin, the bonding between the land and its conquerors was tenuous well into the Soviet times. In Russian politics and culture, the Caucasus remained a distraction, a place to which the recalcitrant subjects of the empire could be dispatched, an object of boastful assertions about “gigantic Russia,” a place from which Russia could extract its oil and where it could manufacture its champagne, but not a place that had a voice or identity separate from that of the empire. A recent

American study of the superfluous man in Russian literature confirms these stereotypes. 68 Similarly, the attitude to Poland and Poles in Russian literature has never been updated by Russian or Western academic industry. In the post-Soviet period, the occasional Russian outbursts accusing the inhabitants of the Caucasus and the Poles of monumental crimes against Russia testify how scarce in Russian discourse are reassessments of Russian attitudes toward the former colonial subjects. 69 The unraveling of the Soviet Union and subsequent emergence of “new” states in the Caucasus carry a promise of change. Significantly, when the Soviet colossus fell apart, not even the proRussian Armenians opted for a union with Russia. Russia had clearly overextended itself in the Caucasus and in the western parts of the former empire. While Russian military resources and clever diplomacy had subjugated these areas and imposed a colonial dependency on them, the long-term prospects, including demographic ones, point to a drastically diminished Russian role in these areas and elsewhere in the twenty-first century. 70 As has been the case with other empires, the Russians may be victims of their own imperial overreach: to paraphrase Stalin, Russianness fitted the Caucasus like a saddle fits a cow. In the 1990s, the cow, however emaciated, shook the saddle off. However, the postcolonial legacy in the Caucasus left it rife with corruption, violence, and other intractable ills. 71 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot remarks that no text stands alone, that it is always perceived against the background of other texts that came from the same tradition. An ability to carry on in tandem with the tradition (even when ostensibly going against it) is a good measure of a poet’s talent. Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s works resonated with the attitudes that later writers incorporated into their texts, taking these attitudes for granted as germane to Russian history and culture. Imperial aggressiveness was one such prominent attitude, so pervasive in subsequent writings as to become invisible to Russian eyes. The Russians did not begin to

think of themselves as an imperial nation until their national consciousness internalized the Caucasus wars. The conquest of the Caucasus provided them an opportunity to hone their colonial rhetoric and consciousness. Colonial discourse, remarked Said, is a cultural privilege of representing the subjugated Other. As this imperial privilege percolated through foreign and domestic commentary on Russian literature (as well as through literature itself), the submerged history of the Caucasus and of other conquered lands faded away from scholarly and popular memory. While Poland and other western provinces of the empire have partially regained their voice in world discourse, the Caucasus has not. For generations now, a combination of great poetry and the distortive intervention of colonialism conspired to produce an image of the Caucasus as confused, divided, criminal, and poor, one of those incomprehensible and dangerous areas on the fringes of the Russian Federation. 72 This perception leads notinfrequently to a conclusion that the Russians might as well keep it. NOTES 1. N. S. Kiniapina et al., Kavkaz i Sredniaia Aziia vo vneshnei politike Rossii: Vtoraia polovina XVIII-80-e gody XIX v. (Moscow, 1984). 2. In a paradoxical way, Liudmila Petrushevskaia's plays and stories, whose action takes place in the cramped space of Soviet apartment blocks, echo Domostroi in that regard, suggesting that future Russia might abandon its imperial pretensions and concentrate on building a citizen-oriented state. 3. Domostroi: po spisku imperatorskogo obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh (Moscow: Universitetskaia Tipografiia M. Katkova, 1882), 1-17. Quoted from a Bradda Books reprint edited by W. F. Ryan (Letchworth and Hertfordshire, England: Bradda Books Ltd., 1971).

4. Isaac Massa de Harlem, Breue Description des chemins qui menent et des fleuves qui passent de la Moscouie vers le Septentrion et VOrient dans la Siberie (1613), in M. Obolensky, ed., Histoire des Guerres de la Moscovie (Brussels: Fr. I. Olivier, 1866). 5. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Perceptions of Other East Slavs before 1654: An Agenda for Historians,” Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter, edited by P. J. Potichnyj et al. (Edmonton, Alberta: CIUS Press, 1992), 20-38. 6. Sergei Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (18511879), vol. 5 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sotsial'no-Ekonomicheskoi Literatury, 1961), 182. 7. D. S. Likhachev's writings on seventeenth-century Russian literature ignore the Polish connection. See chapter 6. 8. A detailed account of the memo/anda of Russia's foreign ministers can be found in Jaroslaw Czubaty, Rosja i s'wiat (Warsaw: Neriton, 1997). 9. John Russell, “Catherine, Also Great as a Collector,” New York Times, 1 October 1998. 10. Ludwik Bazylow, Historia nowozytnej kultury rosyjskiej (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1986), 196. 11. N. Karamzin, “O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1964), 283. 12. Bazylow, 198. 13. “On nedovolen Istoriei Karamzina; on zhelal by, chtoby plamennoe pero izobrazilo perekhod russkogo naroda iz nichtozh'estva k slave i mogushchestvu. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 642.

14. V. G. Kieman, Marxism and Imperialism (New York: St. Martin's, 1974), iii. 15. Seton-Watson. 16. Allen F. Chew, “The Caucasus and Transcaucasia, 1763-1914,” Atlas of Russian History, 72-3. 17. Ibid., 183. 18. Aleksei Petrovich, “Kazaki i severnyi Kavkaz,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 4 June 1994. A defense of General Ermolov’s campaign appeared during the October 1999 offensive against the Chechens, and the disproportionate use of force was defended as follows: “The principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ has a sound moral basis. ... it is impossible to argue against it.” Aleksandr Pronin, “Tragediia Generala Ermolova, Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, no. 40 (15-21 October 1999), 5. 19. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, 430. 20. Henri Troyat, Pushkin, translated by Nancy Amphous (New York: Minerva Press, 1975), 367. 21. Journey to Arzrum, translated by Birgitta Ingemanson. (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1974). 22. The same casual tone appears in Leo Tolstoi's early story “The Cossack*,” which deals with a later stage of the conquest of the Caucasus. 23. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 685. 24. Ibid., vol. 4,684. 25. Rudyard Kipling, Verse (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1940), 280. 26. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 65.

27. Ibid., 695. 28. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 114. 29. Agence France-Presse (Moscow), 21 September 1998 and 2 October 1998. 30. Pushkin, Putechestvie v Arzrum, in Pss, vol. 6, 683. 31. “Hadji Murad,” Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 629. 32. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 472. 33. “Cherkesy nas nenavidiat. My vytesnili ikh iz privol'nykh pastbishch; auly ikh razoreny, tselye plemena unichtozheny.” English translation, Journey to Arzrum, 23; original in Pss, vol. 6, 647. 34. Pushkin, Pss, vol. 6, 644. 35. Ibid., 693. 36. M. Iu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, edited by B. M. Eikhenbaum (Moscow: Akad. Nauk, 1962), 8, 10. 37. Journey to Arzrum, 83. 38. Ibid., 40. 39. Ibid., 80. 40. A survey conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Moscow schools asked the children to present drawings about how they see their future. One boy drew himself among bloody body parts, supplying the caption, “Had there been fewer Georgians and Negroes around, Moscow would have

been cleaner.” According to the survey organizers, this was not an untypical answer. Vitali Vitaiiev, “Projections: Remembering Galina Starovoitova,” Transitions 6, no. 1 (January 1999), 22. 41. Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 629. 42. August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, edited by S. Frederick Starr (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), 320. 43. Angela Stent, Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World (New York: Vintage, 1995), 250. 44. Seton-Watson, 658. 45. Journey to Arzrum, 76. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 691. “Blagosloven chas, kogda vstrechaem poeta. Poet brat dervishu. On ne imeet ni otechestva, ni blag zemnykh; i mezhdu tern kak my, bednye, zabotimsia o slave, o vlasti, o sokrovishchakh, on stoit naravne s vlastelinami zemli i emu pokloniaiutsia.” 46. B habha, Location of Culture, 69; also Moore-Gilbert, 117-118. 47. Ferdydurke (Warsaw: Roj, 1937); in English Ferdydurke, translated by Eric Mosbacher (New York: Grove, 1968). 48. Gayatri Spivak, “The Problem of Cultural Self-Representation,” in The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by S. Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 55-7. 49. V. G. Belinskii, “Geroi nashego vremeni-sochinenie M. Lermontova,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1948), 551-629. 50. “Glubokoe vpechatlenie ostavliaet posle sebia [Bela]: vam grustno, no grust' vasha legka, svetla i sladostna; vy letite mechtoiu

na mogilu prekrasnoi, no eta mogila ne strashna: ee osveshchaet solnce, omyvaet bystryi ruchei, kotorogo ropot, vmeste s shelestom vetra v listakh buziiny i beloi akatsii, govorit vam o chem-to tainstvennom i beskonechnom, i nad neiu, v svetloi vyshine, letaet i nositsia kakoeto prekrasnoe videnie, s blednymi lanitami, s vyrazheniem ukora i proshcheniia v chernykh ochakh, s grustnoi ulybkoi.” Ibid., 578. 51. Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1991); Charles A. Moser, ed. The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). 52. Eikhenbaum, Hero, 125 ff. 53. Bazylow, 191. 54. Alexandre Bennigsen, “Soviet Minority Nationalism in Historical Perspective,” in Robert Conquest, ed. The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 131-150. 55. It recently reappeared in George Kennan's pronouncements on Eastern Europe. See the interview with David Gergen^ chapter 1. 56. Norman Davies details some of these conversions, and he points out that on a single day Catherine distributed among her grandees and courtiers half a million peasants who had previously belonged to Polish landowners. The fate of these dispossessed landowners is shrouded in discreet silence. Norman Davies, God's Playground, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 86-90. 57. In Polish literature, such attitudes were particularly prominent in the novels of Stefan Zeromski. In the first pages of Przedwiosnie (1925), both the narrator's patronizing tone and Mrs. Barykowa's complaint about Russian roads illustrate this persistent perception. 58. Ernest Simmons, Pushkin (New York: Vintage, 1964), 342.

59. Oeuvres completes de Casimir Delavighe (Paris: F. Didot, 1880), vol. 4; St. Leonhard, Der Novemberaufstand in den Polenliedern deutscher Dichter (Krakau: W. Poturalski, 1911); also Davies, vol. 2, 328-30. 60. Renamed Ivan Susanin under the Soviets. 61. Davies, vol. 2, 328-30. 62. In Posobie po istorii otechestva dla postupaiushchikh v vuzy (Moscow: Prostor, 1994), 337, the authors speak of “liberation of the countries of Europe,” suggesting that the Soviet Army took Berlin single-handedly and also played a decisive role in the Japanese surrender. See chapter 6. 63. Roman Szporluk, “The Ukraine and Russia,” in Robert Conquest, editor. The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 151-182. 64. “Liubliu tebia, Petra tvoren'e, / Liubliu tvoi strogii, stroiinyi vid. . . . Krasuisia, grad Petrov, i stoi / Nekolebimo, kak Rossiia! Da umiritsia zhe s toboi / I pobezhdennaia stikhiia.” English translation in Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1962), 113. 65. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 398. 66. George R. Noyes, ed., Poems by Adam Mickiewicz (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1944), 356. Original in Adam Mickiewicz, Poezfe, vol. 3 (Lwow: Gubrynowicz i Syn, 1929), 146. 67. B. M. Eikhenbaum, “Roman M. Iu. Lermontova Geroi nashego vremeni," in M. Iu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, edited by B. M. Eikhenbaum (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1962), 125-162. 68. Jesse and Betty Clardy, The Superfluous Man in Russian Letters (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1980).

69. In fall 1998, the Russian government sent the Polish government a note about the alleged murder of 80,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920. 70. R. Conquest, ed., 314-68; Robert Lyle, “World: Populations Shrinking in Eastern Europe, Russia,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 12 March 1999. 71. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Getting Crude in Baku,” New York Times Magazine, 5 October 1998. 72. In the post-Soviet era, the principal inhabitants of the Caucasus are Christian Armenians and Georgians, and Muslim Azeris. Under the Soviets, they formed three “union republics” comprising the majority nationality and a number of smaller nations, in addition to the colonizing Russian presence. But many nations and ethnicities in the northern foothills of the Caucasus continue to reside within the Russian Federation. At least some of these Turkic peoples aspire to their own statehood, and they are mostly Muslim. 3 The Consolidating Vision: War and Peace as the New Core Myth of Russian Nationhood It has been noted that the strength of a country’s imperial system tends to translate into the power of its imaginative fiction. The British novel was dominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Great Britain was a world empire. The French colonial empire likewise stimulated the appearance of the major French novelists. In contrast, Germany was an also-ran in the scramble for overseas colonies, and its nineteenth-century novels fall short of those of other European powers; when Germany reasserted itself after the FrancoPrussian War, its novelistic output became more significant. It has been suggested that the aggressive attitudes demonstrated in the military and political spheres have also been played out in novels, from Richardson’s accounts of seduction or attempted seduction to

the aggressive resourcefulness of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s overseas businessmen. 1 In Russia too, imperial outreach translated into artistic resourcefulness. The Russian cultural memory is dotted with monuments to warriors who fought for the glory of Russia, and the inscriptions on the plinths were supplied by writers. Lev Tolstoi’s oeuvre in particular mediated imperial power in ways that had a crucial influence on the Russian self-image. It reconfirmed the masculine aspect of that image and its connection with past military victories. War and Peace was written and published during the Russian empire’s most optimistic years. By 1860, Russia had taken possession of the last independent mountain area in the Caucasus v the' principality of Svanetia in northwestern Georgia, and it was poised for a major campaign in Central Asia that likewise proved successful. Within Tolstoi’s lifetime, the tsarist empire annexed Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The western provinces remained securely within the empire’s grip, in spite of insurrections and irredentism. The 1863 rising actually reconfirmed the empire’s might and strengthened it economically, through the confiscation of several thousand estates of Polish, Ruthenian, and Lithuanian noblemen. The abolition of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church and the transfer of its properties to the state or to the Russian Orthodox Church likewise had significant economic and political implications. The memory of the inglorious Crimean War was made relatively easy to bear by these successes. In the 1860s, the empire underwrote the abolition of serfdom. Also, the population of the empire continued to grow spectacularly; between 1850 and 1897, it doubled in size. 2 The social demand for a literature reflecting these victorious realities was strong. During the reign of Alexander II (1855-81), the Russian elites were ready for works of literature that presented a selfassured, Europeanized, and articulate Russia, a Russia serious of purpose yet moderate of voice, a Russia that left behind the attitudes expressed in the political pamphleteering of Karamzin or the more

stringent poems of Pushkin. As Anthony Smith might say, the conditions were propitious for a consolidation of the national selfimage. War and Peace fulfilled the demand in Russia for an imperial epic. It helped to reformulate the empire’s constitutive political myth, it conjured up imagery approprfate for imperial success, and it made rhetorical resistance to the empire difficult, if not impossible, within the boundaries of the Russian cultural discourse. The novel created an image of Russia as a country so benevolent, so free of serious misdeeds and so replete with splendid citizenry acting in “real” history that it became nearly unthinkable to assail it with fundamental criticism. Tp question the bedrock of imperialism on which War and Peace rests would go beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse. One could argue or even fight about what form of government the empire should have, but to endanger the mythical abstraction called Russia, or Rossiiskaia imperiia, so eloquently portrayed in the novel would be to go beyond the limits of the permissible. War and Peace displayed Russian splendor in such a way as to discourage any radicalism tending toward its termination. In it the Russian state appeared to be so selfassured, so permanent a community of citizens, so articulate in its dialogue with the outside world that any doubt about the empire’s legitimacy or Russia’s ethnic borders appeared out of the question, just as it would be out of place to raise the issue of the existence of God in the midst of a fervent religious service. 3 War and Peace delivered to Russian and foreign readers an impassioned and dramatic glorification of Russian nationhood. Such diverse scholars as Anthony Smith, Adrian Hastings, David Miller and Margaret Canovan have argued that the concept of nationhood plays a far more substantial and ancient role in society than has generally been assumed in twentieth-century scholarship. As argued in the introduction, nations usually congeal around key events in communal history, such as births and deaths of great leaders or turning points in relationships with other groups. Among the latter, wars and ensuing losses or gains have been paramount. Few things

strengthen the sense of nationhood more effectively than an invasion by a former ally of a huge country that was itself accustomed instead to invading others. War and Peace drew on all these resources. The drama of the changing alliances, the surprise, anger, bitterness, and social mobilization achieved in the aftermath of an invasion provided excellent material with which to reconfirm national identity. In addition, the invasion had been carried out by a glorious personality who had conquered Europe and become the stuff of legends; to suffer at his hands and then defeat him was prime material for a national saga. The blend of authority and verisimilitude created an image of a homeland of which Russians could be justifiably proud. To fight against, and beat down, a major European power was an achievement that could be scrutinized without blushing, one that confirmed Russia’s European status. The Napoleonic invasion provided an opportunity to update the Russian political selfperception, by adding to it the touch of self-righteous legitimacy that a victorious war against an invader generally supplies. To do so in the mythologizing context of a great novel was exactly what a dynamic nation needed. Tolstoi’s refashioning of history into the mythology of “the Great Patriotic War” added new shine to what Anthony Smith has dubbed the “core political myth” of a nation. Having portrayed foreign aggression and the meting out of justice to the aggressor, Tolstoi also painted a panorama of several hundred characters who carried on with their lives in spite of interruptions and losses caused by the war. This added an additional heroic dimension to the novel. The presence of War and Peace in discourse within Russian culture and outside it, in libraries and classrooms, generated a “compound interest” beyond the wildest dreams of subaltern cultures. War and Peace has told countless readers that Russia is a country of good and gentle people like Karataev and Tushin, not the aggressive colossus that “the slanderers of Russia” have made it out to be. Contemporary elites were to see that its aristocracy was “just like us.” It is unpretentious, generous, industrious, and prone to harmless oddities, like the old Prince Bolkonskii’s fascination with French ways

and mores. The straightforward and unself-conscious Pierre Bezukhov represents educated Russians: frequently in the wrong and perhaps badly organized, but always sincere and spontaneous. Prince Andrei is a superior human being, with all the dangers of overintellectualization but also a noble heart and, again, a lack of the cunning and double-dealing so characteristic of the heroes of Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, or Thackeray. Cunning types are a small minority in War and Peace, and they play marginal roles in the plot: the Bergs and the Kuragins are only blips on the panorama of magnificence unfolded by Tolstoi. The women of this story, this masculine novel par excellence, meet the traditional expectations while adding to the gallery of strong Russian women (which Pushkin had initiated). Princess Marie is no less accomplished than the Western European princesses of her time. Natasha Rostova tells us loudly and clearly that she need not be compared to anyone, that she stands by herself as quintessentially Russian and as thoroughly admirable even in her small failings, such as her ill-conceived adventure with Anatolii Kuragin. War and Peace is sunny without being shallow, perhaps the only great novel ever written in which knowledge of human nature does not diminish the author’s optimism. It bears repeating that the Russian polity profited enormously from Tolstoi’s ability to combine depth with jubilance, and that the representation of Empire in his novel established itself in the memory of readers as the real thing. As retold by Tolstoi, the French invasion consolidated the myth of Russian imperial innocence and helped to legitimize Russia s imperialist activities. War and Peace treats the main theater of war against Napoleon —Eastern Europe—as rightfully Russian. The novel delayed in Russia the realization that the Russian 88 Imperial Knowledge empire was not the same as ethnic Russia. Tolstoi put the finishing touches on the perception, first articulated by Pushkin, that Russia defeated the emperor of the French single-handedly and paid with its

own blood for Europe’s freedom; an inchoate belief that Russia is capable not only of defending itself but also of saving Europe has lingered in Russian national memory ever since. Likewise, it was owing to War and Peace that the choice the empire made to keep fighting its southern neighbors while defending itself from Napoleon faded from view. A writer so oblivious of the empire’s dealings with the Caucasus and yet so indignant over Napoleon’s dealings with Russia clearly worked in the imperialistic mode. From that colonialist perch, Tolstoi convinced his Russian (and later foreign) readers that insofar as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was concerned, there was only one story to tell, and that it was the one being told in the novel. History is synchronic: it unfolds in time. Mythology happens in the everlasting present. It is always there, like the myth of the rodina, to be defended: it is diachronic. In War and Peace, Tolstoi uses history to reinforce mythology and vice versa, and thus he weds synchronicity and diachronicity. Few writers have been as successful at this enterprise. We seem to be immersed in history while reading the novel —it is clearly staked out as happening between 1805 and 1820—but at the same time, we imbibe the mythological creativity that refashions for us the actual Russia of the early nineteenth century into a representation of mythological Russia, a country of everlasting beauty inhabited by nearly unblemished people. War and Peace evokes Russian exceptionalism while at the same time maintaining credibility as a narrative about historical events. It is this perfect illusion of “reality” adorned by imagination that gives the novel so powerful a presence. As a Russian critic put it, it is “[a] complete picture of Russia of that day.” Tolstoi took it for granted: “N. N. Strakhov has placed War and Peace on the pinnacle where it will remain in the opinion of society.” 4 He might have added that his personal achievement would become Russian society’s achievement and that it would lift the self-esteem of Russians to a level that had not been reached before. LANDSCAPE AND STABILITY

Tolstoi’s contribution begins with the transformation of landscapes into symbols. The Russian national mythology contains an abundance of what may be described as sacred or semisacred sites: battlefields, holy cities, rivers, lakes, man-made monuments, houses that prominent Russians built or in which they lived, furniture they used, clothing they wore, public events they attended, manuscripts they wrote. Sociologists point out that monuments and sacred sites reinforce a sense of common identity; 5 to have a number of such sites is standard for any culture. For a nation to have a sense of self, certain localities have to acquire special places in the imagination of an ethnic group. Russians, while not unique in treasuring their holy sites or in building monuments to commemorate their heroes, have been quite unusually addicted to them. Blok’s Kulikovo Field, the battles and landscapes scattered throughout Tolstoi’s novels and stories, and the Soviet celebrations of Stalingrad (Nekrasov’s novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad ), historicized nature and geography to a degree that was not at tempted by the Victorian novelists in regard to the British countryside, or by Balzac and Flaubert in regard to French landscapes. In Gogol'’s Dead Souls, Chichikov travels through the Russian plains, which eventually acquire mythical proportions. Toward the end of the novel, the image of Chichikov’s troika of horses is transformed: Russia suddenly emerges as a wild troika rushing toward an unknown destination, while other nations and states step aside to make way for her ruthless gallop. War and Peace contributes mightily to this treasury of memories about sacred places. On several occasions in War and Peace, the Russian landscape becomes a revered symbol of Russia. The vast plain, with rolling hills here and there but mostly flat, punctuated by birch trees and forests: this is the quintessential Russia, where the mythical Russian nation pursues its life’s journey. This is why Pierre’s experience at Borodino is perhaps the most powerful blending of history and mythology in all of Russian literature. When Pierre mounts the knoll at Borodino, he is spellbound by the beauty of the Russian landscape. He sees the

forest, “golden cornfields interspersed with copses,” the river Kolocha and the Smolensk high road, crowded with troops. 6 The rodina is breathtakingly beautiful, but it also must be defended. This landscape generates one of Pierre’s epiphanies. Somewhat earlier in the novel, Natasha Rostova sits by the window in Otradnoe (Russian for “delightful”), taking in the moonlit Russian countryside. The view inspires her to fly, and it also uplifts Prince Andrei, who overhears Natasha’s rapture. In Russian folklore, the berezka, or the birch tree, symbolizes Russianness in ways no other European nation shares. An encounter with the berezka is melancholy, in a not unpleasant way. The oak tree is another symbol, one of Russian fertility and abundance, as in Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila: “Na lukomor'e dub zelenyi ...” Prince Andrei sees the first leaves on birches when he visits his Riazan 1 estates, and he is appropriately melancholy, but it is his encounter with the oak tree that conveys to him the renewal that the Russian landscape can offer. When he first sees it, the oak is gnarled and barren, “with its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically and its bark scarred.” A few days later the oak is covered with a “canopy of sappy dark-green foliage . . . rapt and . . . trembling in the rays of the evening sun.” 7 Prince Andrew experiences a springtime joy and an epiphany, or revelation of the meaning of life. The scene of the wolf hunt blends communal spirit with the proclivity to violence that has been a mark of imperial nations. There are two great literary descriptions of a wolf hunt, one in Tolstoi and the other in Alfred de Vigny’s 1843 poem “The Death of a Wolf’ [“La Mort du Loup”]. The wolf hunt in War and Peace is seen solely from thestandpoint of the hunters, whereas de Vigny makes the wolf speak words of existential anguish. It is significant that some of War and Peace’s most benign heroes participate in the wolf hunt: Nikolai Rostov (although we remember his readiness to kill at the bidding of the tsar), a goodnatured minor nobleman (the “Uncle” in whose hut Natasha performed her memorable peasant dance), old Count Rostov, and some gentle-minded peasants. When the wolf is finally

overcome by a pack of dogs, one of the peasants, Daniel, whispers happily, “We’ll gag her!” He sets his foot on the wolf s neck, 90 Imperial Knowledge thrusts a stick between her jaws, binds her legs together, and turns her over to be put on a horse: With happy, exhausted faces, they laid the old wolf, alive, on a shying and snorting horse and, accompanied by the dogs yelping at her, took her to the place where they were all to meet. . . . The huntsmen assembled with their booty and their stories, and all came to look at the wolf which, with her broad-browed head hanging down and the bitten stick between her jaws, gazed with great glassy eyes at this crowd of dogs and men surrounding her. When she was touched, she jerked her bound legs and looked wildly yet simply at everybody. Old Count Rostov also rode up and touched the wolf. “Oh, what a formidable one!” said he. “A formidable one, eh?” he asked Daniel, who was standing near. “Yes, your excellency,” answered Daniel, quickly doffing his cap. The count remembered the wolf he had let slip and his encounter with Daniel. “Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!” said the count. For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable smile. 8 % What is striking in this description is the narrator’s lack of empathy for the animal, who slowly suffocates as she is being carried upside down on a horse’s back, bleeding and unable to get enough air. The ability to disregard such niceties was surely an attribute of the imperial quests that the Russians repeatedly undertook in the course

of their history. The wolf is an enemy defeated, and the joy of victory is all that the hunters care for, from the lowliest peasant to the aristocrat. Significantly, the final words of that scene refer to the Russian peasant’s meek and kind smile, a smile that makes him a relative of meek and gentle fellows who make their appearance in the works of Dostoevskii and Tiutchev, among others, and who in War and Peace are represented by the holy fools entertained by Princess Marie. In contrast, de Vigny’s hunt contains no imperial symbolism; rather, it looks forward to that existential firmness with which de Vigny’s contemporary, Spren Kierkegaard, was to view the world. Here too a wolf has been killed. He is surrounded by hunters and dogs, just as in War and Peace. He has been shot repeatedly, mangled by dogs, and wounded by the knives of those who had seen him fall down in exhaustion. The wolf surveys the situation briefly, says the speaker; then he closes his eyes and dies without a sound. The speaker had managed to look the wolf in the eye before the animal died, and he reconstructs what the wolf tried to express by that look: “If you can, learn how / To remain focused and thoughtful, / Until you reach that level of fierce stoicism / Which I, bom in the woods, have reached. / It is equally cowardly to moan, to cry, or to pray. / Discharge the tasks of life with vigor, / Walk firmly on the road which Fate designated for you; / And then, suffer and die without speaking, just as I have.” 9 The differences between civilizations of which Samuel Huntington has spoken manifest themselves with particular clarity in the juxtaposition of these two vi sions of the killing of a hunted animal. In Tolstoi, a young empire and its people display unflagging vigor in pursuing and eliminating the enemy, and they fail entirely to identify with those whom they have defeated. De Vigny displays an ability to empathize with another’s pain, a quality fatal for empires but characteristic of mature cultures.

While the mythologizing of localities and actions proceeds apace, the economic reasons for Napoleon’s campaign in Russia go unmentioned. The FrancoRussian war originated in the failure of the alliance of two countries who in 1808 had secretly negotiated a partition of Turkey. 10 The straw that broke the alliance’s back was a conflict over trade. The Russians were unwilling to curtail their lucrative trade with England, and their trade policies favored the English and disadvantaged the French. The economic blockade of England by Napoleon made the Russian-English sea trade difficult and risky. In 1810, Alexander I imposed heavy import duties on goods that came to Russia by land, mainly from France. After this blow to French interests, war was only a matter of time. In blotting out these reasons for war and portraying Russia as a victorious victim rather than prey and predator at the same time, Tolstoi became a major contributor to the notion of victimhood, which plays an essential part in the political mythology of Russians. He also reconfirmed the notion that Russian victimhood does not preclude grandeur and success, that it can go hand in hand with the self-perception that one is a great nation. War and Peace created a symbolic structure within which Russia’s imperial nationhood could comfortably reside. It articulated a flattering version of Russian history in a mode that was comprehensible to domestic and Western readers. Owing largely to War and Peace, Russia’s core national myth has as its centerpiece the foreign incursion and Russian selfdefense. It has been noted that the creation of such symbolic structures is vital for a society’s selfunderstanding and equilibrium. 11 War and Peace mythologized virtually every event it touched, without depriving them of historical verisimilitude. It contributed in a major way to the literate Russian society’s sense of equilibrium, a feeling that it occupied the right place in European history. Before Tolstoi’s novel reconfigured the nation’s constitutive political myth, the Russian elites were inexperienced in imperial discourse within their own culture. The span of historical memory in Russia was shorter than the comparable spans of the countries of Western Europe, and what that memory contained had not been made fit for

public display through the mediation of art. In spite of efforts of Slavophiles who tried to inject self-assurance into Russian culture by evoking the idea of manifest destiny, Russia’s self-articulation as a benevolent empire was not yet totally convincing to its own elites. The problem was partly that an imperial myth is harder to stabilize when colonies are close to home: any contraction of borders or any attempt by a subjugated people to become sovereign is perceived as a threat to the nation itself. A great power at peace with its neighbors, set on a civilizing mission overseas, is one thing; a country that continuously looks over its shoulders at hostile subalterns is another. A sense of Russian national identity was abundantly present, but the nature of that identity was contestable. The Slavophile movement was itself a means to cope with the instability and perceived impermanence of the empire. By investing in the myth of an ancient Slavic mir that allegedly lay at the foundation of Rus', the Slavophiles tried to counter that impermanence. 12 They were only partially successful. War and Peace, however, succeeded. War and Peace exudes a sense of permanence and stability. As represented in the novel, Russian culture seems to be at peace with itself. The tone of peevishness is gone, replaced by a readiness to provide universal models of behavior, in the way in which Western European works used to provide them —in short, a readiness to become a leader. While its mythologizing component is strong, the novel is free of a Glinkaesque resentment, intent on fanning national prejudices. It shows Russia as a great power, comfortable in the role of giver of orders, the kind of Russia that the Russians of Pushkin’s generation would have liked to have had. Tolstoi’s Russia abounds in people who can reminisce about the turbulence of the past amidst the security and importance of the present. War and Peace's role in consolidating Russian self-perception is similar to the role played by the historical plays of William Shakespeare with respect to the English. Shakespeare’s Histories present England in all its glory 7 , through its kings and princes, knights and jesters, unself-conscious in their failures and successes and disregarding the judgment of

Others. War and Peace supplies a model of a* discourse that has found its place in the world and does not have to look over its shoulder to check whether it is in tune with what is acceptable in the world. It takes more than one novel to make such residual uncertainties fade away, but the strides made by Tolstoi’s work were decisive. The imperial glory that it captured led to its continuous popularity among all strata of Russian society. Lenin liked it, and so does Solzhenitsyn. The new universalizing tone is apparent even in the first chapter. A critic once said that it is strange that such a massive structure would begin with such a trivial conversation, and in French. But the seemingly fragile beginning is not trivial at all: it presents the upper reaches of Russian society conducting their business in an international milieu, addressing foreign aristocracy as equals, and navigating gracefully in the deep waters of international politics. The guests at Anna Scherer’s salon are no longer circumscribed by the British traveler’s description of the “rude and barbarous kingdom” or by Michelet’s condemnation of Russian brutality. Their place in the European power structure is no longer under suspicion. The first chapter makes a statement about Russia’s best and brightest, and it suggests that they need no longer be angry, as Pushkin had been. They have arrived. It is significant that the first phrases of the novel are in French and that the speaker, who is a Russian, bears a German name. The invitations to her evening party had been written in French. Likewise, Prince Andrei and Bilibin (modeled on Russia’s astute foreign-policy specialist, Prince A. M. Gorchakov) use French rather than Russian in their ultranationalistic conversation about the campaign of 1805. In its original edition, the novel was liberally sprinkled with French passages, which become less frequent later in the story, marking a decline in enthusiasm for the French language during and after the successful war against Napoleon. This decline is also intimated in the correspondence between

Julie Karagina and Princess Marie. The French passages and the occasional inserts in German proclaimed Tolstoi’s comfortable acceptance of the fact that the Russian educated classes had spoken a foreign tongue in certain periods of Russian history. Two generations earlier, this fact had caused an unease that had made an early nineteenth-century vice admiral, Aleksandr Shishkov, form a Society of Lovers of the Russian Language, a nervous attempt to privilege Russian over the fashionable and versatile French. By the 1860s, the Russian language was doing very well indeed, the use of French had diminished, and quite a few Russians of foreign origin had made their way to the upper strata of society. Instead of Frenchifying or Germanizing Russian culture, these new additions to Russian nationality had contributed a Western European polish that even the most xenophobic spokespersons for the empire accepted as one of the benefits accruing to imperial entities in the aftermath of conquest. The sophisticated characters in War and Peace would have been puzzled if one of their own had tried to mount a defense like Shishkov’s of the Russian language. Let us consider the implications for Russian culture of the abovementioned correspondence in French between Julie and Marie, two young ladies, both Russian and both well-bred. That two future matrons and bearers of children of the elite cannot find adequate words in their own tongue to express girlish emotions corresponds to the realities of pre-Pushkin Russia. Nor was the use of French limited to the exchanges of adolescent reveries: Andrei and Pierre also communicate in French, indicating their impatience with the modest stock of concepts and nuances available in early-nineteenthcentury Russian. Such a state of affairs implies a culture’s deep discomfort about itself. Linguistically speaking, Alexandrine Russia could be compared to areas of Africa and Asia that adopted English or French as official languages and retained them as languages of instruction up to and including the twentieth century. Yet Russia itself was a mistress of colonies, poised to weaken their original identities while imposing on them its own. This paradoxical situation of feeling both inferior and superior to Others surfaced many times in Russian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tolstoi, however,

is no longer threatened by it, and the readers partake of his sense of calm. The first chapter rehearses what Anthony Smith has called the lateral ethnie. It presents the upper stratum of Russian society in conversation with itself. Tolstoi shows it to be articulate and cosmopolitan. Anna Scherer is Russian through and through; she had surrendered her background to the country of her birth. Pierre Bezukhov, a Russian landowning millionaire lacking social graces, is not particularly bothered by his social inadequacies. It takes ethnic self-confidence to show a member of the country’s^topmost elite behaving like a country bumpkin, and only a writer who was fully convinced of Russia’s cultural sovereignty could have done it without endangering the authority of the empire. Had Tolstoi been writing in the eighteenth century, he could not have presented a son of one of Catherine’s “grandees” in so ambiguous a light. In the literature of Catherine’s period and earlier, all Russians destined “to appear in public” as literary characters strutted in the best tradition of selfaggrandizement. A person of Pierre’s demeanor would have been considered an embarrassment in Kheraskov’s pitiful Rossiada or in Sumarokov’s dreadful tragedies, whose goal was to demonstrate to the world and to the Russians thertiselves that Russia was a cultivated country, conversant with the literary fashions of Western Europe. Karamzin’s Poor Liza [Bednaia Liza ] (1792) imitated Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and Sumarokov’s dramatic works were a belated echo of Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies. Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin became popular partly because its hero was sophisticated and fashionably bored, and thus European par excellence. Evgenii Onegin's characters are highly stylized and not at all realistic, including Tatiana, who, as the author assures us, had a Russian soul but the manners of a well-bred young lady from nineteenth-century European provinces. Pushkin merely followed the rules of Western Romantic literatures when he coyly remarked that the name Tatiana was perhaps not refined enough for a poem.

Tolstoi is free of such obligations and anxieties. He is convinced that Russia is a major state, not trying to measure up to others but claiming a place of its own in world culture, and he conveys this belief to his readers. The ease with which the narrator leads us from Anna Scherer’s reception rooms to Prince Andrei Bolkonskii’s estate confirms the author’s self-assurance vis-a-vis European culture. Bolkonskii is a Francophile, and he can remain so without apology or further explanation, unlike Evgenii Onegin, whose education had to be described in% detail to reassure the reader (never mind that it was done in an ironic fashion) that it did indeed conform to European norms. In Catherine’s time, Prince Bolkonskii’s Francophilia might have been considered a slavish imitation of foreign customs, against which a Shishkov or a Fonvizin might have protested. In Alexander II’s time, Russia was strong enough to tolerate such pathetic Francophiles as the old Bolkonskii — especially since he, unlike Onegin, remained a Russian patriot at heart. The Russian imperial identity was now firmly established, and one could be both a patriot and a Francophile. Tolstoi’s heroes are at ease being who they are, and at the same time they relate comfortably to those who are not Russian. This is what being authentic is all about: knowing one’s own place in relation to others. Tolstoi made Russian aristocracy believable, a condition that, in his age, was a sine qua non for gaining a footing in world literature, whose thoroughfares were lined with empires, represented by their most talented writers. While the initial scene in Anna Scherer’s salon can be compared to chamber music, the section dealing with the joint Austrian, German, and Russian campaign against Napoleon in 1805 is a symphony. For the first time ever, Russia is shown as an active friend of the West, a partner in the game of nations, an ally gloriously united with the Western European powers. The Austrians are depicted with a bit of relaxed condescension, a tone previously unheard in Russian literature, where the West was either worshipped or maligned. Bilibin, the Russian diplomat in Vienna, is looked upon not as an exotic oddity but as an aristocrat who stands a notch higher than the rank-and-file members of the European elites: les mots de Bilibine se colportaient dans les salons de Vienne, remarks the narrator (and

note the use of French). 13 The Moravian town of Brno (rather than the Slavic name, the German designation of Briinn, Russified as Briunn, is used throughout the novel), in which Bilibin is stationed, earns from him a snobbish “this wretched Moravian hole”—expressed, of course, in French: ce villain trou morave . 14 Bilibin says that to young Russian aristocrats who have recently arrived from Vienna and look down on the provincial atmosphere of Brno. They are obviously familiar with the exciting atmosphere of St. Petersburg’s court, and a Central European midsized town seemed provincial to them. Bohemia and Moravia were under Austrian rule at that time, and while they were indeed provincial by comparison to Paris or Vienna, they fit squarely in the European cultural paradigm, which a few generations earlier, seemed beyond the reach of the Russians. Tolstoi successfully projects onto the Napoleonic era the certainties of an empire, certainties that in fact congealed only long after these wars. In reality, Russian officers of the Napoleonic period still looked upon even the provincial West with awe. A less artistically skillful observer, such as Nadezhda Durova in her Journal, saw in Russia’s western neighbors sophistication, material abundance, and good manners that she could scarcely find at home. 15 But War and Peace shows Russians condescending to the Westerners. In this context, Tolstoi’s musings about history acquire special significance. They are the crowning expression of the imperial selfassurance that permeates the novel. Tolstoi’s opinions are delivered from the tribunal supplied by a huge and victorious state. His interpretation implies that the actions of millions of human beings had brought Russia to her present glory. Needless to say, nations and social classes satisfied with the status quo were more likely to proclaim that Alexander’s victory over Napoleon had been inevitable and the will of the masses of people, than were the nations and classes who were losers in the power game. Tolstoi invoked historical justice and the logic of history to prop up the Russian empire; he obviously would have been less complaisant had Russia lost the Napoleonic wars. His vision of history implies a monumental

and inevitable march of the victors, appropriately advanced by a spokesperson for an imperial nation. FICTIONAL CHARACTERS AND HISTORICAL FIGURES Tolstoi’s universalizing narrative is not limited to large vistas. He stoops to depict the daily joys and drudgeries of the Russian aristocracy. Here his novel diverges in subtle ways from nineteenthcentury Western novels, which dealt primarily with the middle classes. Here is an outline of these differences. It has been observed that each well-developed national mythology has produced what can be called the culture of the ordinary. 16 It has to do with everyday life of men and women over a period of time. The Western novel contributed to that culture by focusing on the dives of the new social classes rather than on those of the aristocracy. The nineteenth-century English novel repeatedly inscribed on the reader’s memory the acceptability and desirability of a bourgeois lifestyle and the plethora of customs and ceremonies this lifestyle produced. Everyone could partake of these ceremonies, as witnessed by the trickling down of bourgeois manners to the lowest circles of British society within a few generations. The seventeenth-century Dutch paintings went even farther: they inculcated in their audiences an acceptance of such prosaic activities as cleaning, cooking, eating, and enjoying domesticity in the family circle. Through Jan Vermeer’s painting “The Kitchen-maid” (c. 1660) we not only learn what the inside of a Dutch kitchen was like but also acquire a new appreciation of the simple tasks performed in it. The painting bestows a certain dignity on kitchen work, lifting it up from anonymity and invisibility to the dignity of an artistic representation. It democratizes culture by suggesting that even the lowliest occupations in society are worthy of a respectful second look. A version of such ordinary domesticity was also portrayed in Russia, in War and Peace. It was, however, profoundly different from depictions of bourgeois acceptance of kitchen drudgery. In some

ways, it was a Potemkinized version of daily culture. The name of Catherine’s lover is invoked here because the wonderful domesticity of the Rostovs, in which the readers of War and Peace naturally rejoice, was paper-thin. The washing of dishes and the scrubbing of floors are miraculously absent in it, and the percentage of Russians who partook of that domesticity was exceedingly small. War and Peace depicts the upper few hundred families, not the Russian city dwellers or small landowners. The spontaneity of Natasha Rostova conceals the labor of the countless servants who made such spontaneity possible. In contrast, Western European novels were peopled by the ever more numerous representatives of the middle and lower classes in the cities and in the countryside. This was particularly true of the English noveU The king and queen and their courtiers do not appear as characters in the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, or Austen. The tiny and elusive world of royalty and aristocracy was a closed book to most Western novelists, whose personal lives likewise unfolded within the squirearchy or the urban middle class. Not so in Russia, where the middle class was virtually nonexistent. The families that appear in War and Peace belong to a tiny fraction of 1 percent of Russian society. They are so close to the autocrat that he inevitably appears in the novel on several occasions, talking to them and participating in their lives. In real life too, Tolstoi’s wife paid a visit to the emperor pleading for permission to publish her husband s novels. Yet Western readers of War and Peace perceive these extraordinary relationships as typical Russian realities, in the same way in which the heroes of Dickens or Austen are typical of nineteenth-century London or the British countryside. Thus, when Strakhov opined that the novel was “[a] complete picture of human life. A complete picture of the Russia of that day,” he was only partly right. 17 Likewise, in his comments on War and Peace Pisarev failed to distinguish between the Russian landowner and the Russian aristocrat. 18 Such little inaccuracies were augmented by later critics, and they produced a notion that War and Peace reflects ordinary Russian life in the same way in which the Dutch realistic paintings or English realistic novels reflect the everydayness of Holland or England. Score one more point for Tolstoi’s ability to commandeer the perceptions of readers.

Thus, in War and Peace the Russian upper classes not only came of age but became the icons of ordinary Russianness. Pushkin has ironically intoned the catchphrases of the Russian sophisticates of his day: “His father . . . used to give three balls a year. . . . Madame first watched him competently, / From her Monsieur received the child. 19 Tolstoi, in contrast, described the aristocratic children’s education in War and Peace as corresponding to Russian wishes and needs, regardless of any borrowing from the West. Western education does enter the picture, but only as a supplement to the Russian identity of characters. The Rostov household rehearses the “home, sweet home” theme, absent in previous Russian literature, and it does so in the Russian way, with Natasha’s “inappropriate first appearance being a signal that Russian aristocratic domesticity differed from the Western one. The begetting and raising of upper-class children, in whom War and Peace abounds, was an important element of this new image of Russian domesticity. The population growth of the Russian empire during Tolstoi’s lifetime was unprecedented, and the writer himself followed the mainstream fathering thirteen children. To show a change of generations was a confidence-building measure, and the multitude of progeny meant hope for the future. Tolstoi’s ability to incorporate into the novel children of various ages was remarkable, and so was his presentation of sons replacing fathers, and daughters replacing mothers. It was characteristic of nineteenth-century Russian novels to deal with several generations of people, as if responding to the demographic dynamism of the period. A productive national myth always includes the passing of generations and the process of sons becoming fathers, to quote Michael Holquist. 20 The absence of such passages in twentieth-century Russian novels (as well as in Western European novels) parallels the population decline characteristic of the late-twentiethcentury Europe.

In this connection, one may also ask whether the Mansfield Park problem, as outlined by Said, exists in War and Peace. Is there a colonial source of income that makes the graceful growth of the population possible? Is Pierre Bezukhov, that gentle giant, one of the loveliest characters in all of Russian literature, secretly dependent on the tears and sweat of dispossessed people? The answer is yes, insofar as Pierre owes his fabulous wealth to the no less fabulous inheritance his father bestowed on him. His father, Count Bezukhov, was “a wellknown grandee of Catherine’s time” ( znamenityi ekaterinskii velmozha ). 21 Count Bezukhov’s lands had been bestowed on him by Catherine. They were located near Moscow (the smaller part) and near Kiev (the larger part). The second partition of Poland in 1793 had resulted in the annexation by the Russian Empire of a hundred thousand square miles of Ukraine west, north, and south of Kiev (until 1793 the city of Kiev had been located on the border between the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and Russia). 22 The massive expropriation of Ruthenian landowners in these and other areas allowed Catherine to distribute among her grandees a million peasants previously belonging to these landowners. We learn from War and Peace that most bf Pierre’s serfs resided in the Kiev province. 23 The lands and the peasants taken by force from the Commonwealth’s landlords play in Bezukhov’s life the role that the slaves of the Antigua plantation play in the genteel and orderly milieu of Mansfield Park. The change of ownership entailed new hardships for the rural taxpayers (the Russian grandees paid no taxes, but their peasants did). Pierre’s enabling wealth had originated in a story (not told by Tolstoi) of fear, anger, loss, and disappearance. The violence that preceded the conquest by Russia of Poland’s western Ukraine caused untold suffering to the defeated. In the novel, the acquisition of Polish and Ukrainian colonies by the militant and militarized Russia remains invisible to readers’ eyes, just as the secret engine that made the estate of Mansfield Park run so smoothly remains invisible to English readers’ eyes, or did until the cold gaze of postcolonial critics added a previously unnoticed dimension to Jane Austen’s novel. Perhaps the

future critics of War and Peace will likewise begin to notice the spaces from which the novel studiedly detours. The cementing in the reader’s imagination of the mythology of Russian statehood would have been incomplete without the introduction of vertical ethnie, or the habits and memories of the lower classes. Peasants play a minor role in War and Peace, and they are mostly faceless and boorish, as in the Bogucharovo scene. Platon Karataev, however, is dramatically different. He is also different from the peasants in Turgenev’s Hunter’s Sketches, and he does not at all resemble the stylized nurse in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Karataev is a sage, and he appropriately contributes to Pierre’s spiritual development. His role in the novel is to suggest that unsung heroes of the Russian nation come from the lowest stratum of society. Karataev voluntarily enlists in the army to save his brother’s family from dissolution. He shares his meager rations with Pierre. In conditions of imminent danger he turns out to be spiritually resourceful, and he takes note of Pierre’s helplessness and estrangement in captivity. He smells of sweat and skillfully uses foot wraps instead of socks. These touches of realism obscure the fact that the fraternization between Pierre and Karataev is nothing short of extraordinary. In real life, camaraderie between counts and peasants, even in conditions of hardship, was uncommon. In prison conditions as described by Dostoevskii in The House of the Dead, the peasants profoundly hate the nobility. In spite of these caveats, Karataev slips easily into the role of a typical Russian peasant, and no critical discourse has ever tried to dislodge him from that position. What more, Tolstoy’s narrator persuades us that Karataev took pity on Pierre partly because he saw that Pierre was an aristocrat and was unprepared for the hardships of travel as a prisoner of war. Thus the unlikely couple became a source and a confirmation of the myth about Russian solidarity across class lines. Another invocation of the vertical ethnie appears in connection with Natasha, the most attractive female character in the novel. Here too

the reality of strict class divisions is obliterated, and the mythology of Russian nationhood takes over. In real life, Russia’s economic backwardness made for the vastly different standards of living and therefore huge differences in taste and culture between the social classes. Yet Countess Natasha Rostova’s dance in her “uncle’s” cabin is one of the most successful literary proclamations of the unity of the Russian people. The narrator asks: “Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an emigree French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de chale would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced?” 24 The question remains unanswered, but we do not care, just as the remarkable camaraderie between Pierre and Karataev convinces us even though historical support is lacking. A few chapters earlier, Natasha attended her first grand ball, where no Russian dances were tolerated. One reason why Natasha comes off as an exceptionally rich and nuanced character is that she can be a proud aristocrat (as in her refusal to make friends with Princess Marie) and a simple girl who can immerse herself in peasant merriment. She symbolizes Russia more than any other character—the mythological Russia, of course, not the political or social one. That Tolstoi advanced these new Russian visions more consciously than may at first appear is indicated by his careful apportioning of history and mythology to the various characters and episodes. His self-appointed task was to weld into representations of history the mythological memory of the nation. It involved an ability to structure the development of characters in such a way as to create an imaginative merger between them and remembered history. The adventures of heroes of War and Peace are not just splashes of color on the panorama of historical events but purposive actions that change history ever so slightly (and sometimes not so slightly). As Anthony Smith has noted, inserting fictional characters into historical narratives is a most effective way of contributing to the nation’s political mythology, which in turn assumes a life of its own and eventually becomes a part of “reality.” Tolstoi’s attention to historical

detail, his ability to conjure up such characters as Pierre Bezukhov and Platon Karataev, and the redrawing of historical figures like Napoleon and Kutuzov, added a previously unknown depth to Russian cultural discourse. Tolstoi coordinated the life stories of fictional heroes with the ebb and flow of Napoleonic events, and he made his fictional characters contribute to historical causality. Individual stories are thus synchronized with a detailed “real” story of Napoleon’s times, while being at the same time represented in a diachronic way, as unfolding in time and influenced by the multiplicity of other events also unfolding in time. In so doing, Tolstoi added a mythological dimension to nineteenth-century Russian history, in the same way in which Rudyard Kipling added the mythology of “good” colonialism to the British dealings with India. Consider a prominent intersection of history and mythology, in the person of Captain Tushin. He first appears during Prince Andrei’s survey of the troops: he is bootless and embarrassed, dirty, short, and insignificant, but he has “large, intelligent, and kindly eyes.” We surmise that he is going to be a positive hero and will play a role in the war. Sure enough, the next few dozen pages are sprinkled with wonderfully coincidental meetings and happenings that confirm Tushin’s position as a model soldier and accord him a key role in winning a battle. Tushin’s superiors misinterpret him, but Tolstoi sends Prince Andrei to the rescue. When Tushin is being scolded by his commander, Prince Bagration, for abandoning his artillery, Andrei explains what had happened, and virtue is duly rewarded. Tushin congeals into a stereotype of the Russian soldier—more generally, into a Russian “littte'mafi,” whose endurance, wisdom, devotion to the rodina, and common sense carry Russia thorough the turbulence of history. Tushin is presented in such a way as to generate our sympathy: he is modest and awkward in advancing his own interests, and we group him with Gogol s Akakii Akakievich Bashmachkin, Dostoevskii’s Makar Devushkin, and other literary characters of the lower middle class who were much put-upon and represent the suffering Russia. But Tushin is also a hero, a man who defends and saves his rodina; he is both admirable and pitiable. Such stereotypes soften the image of

100 Imperial Knowledge Russia for us, they reinforce the invisibility of aggression and foreground Russia’s posture of meekness and self-defense. Or consider the symbolic gesture of charity and Russian patriotism made by Natasha during the evacuation of Moscow. When Natasha orders the family possessions to be taken off the carts and carriages carrying the Rostov clan away from Moscow, she not only inserts herself into a historical event in the making but contributes to the Russian state’s constitutive myth complex, which says that the Russians love their rodina more than personal advantage. It is the wounded Russian soldiers that Natasha wants to take with her instead of private possessions. The ability of Russians to put Russia’s interests above private concerns is foregrounded, reinforced, and canonized by Natasha’s gesture. Tolstoi’s remarkable discretion concerning Kutuzov’s role in the disaster of Austerlitz is another instance of the prestige-building strategy of inserting creative fictions into representations of history. Tolstoi knew that the Russian general had been the chief allied strategist in that battle, but he suppressed this information, suggesting instead that it had been due to the Austrians that the battle of Austerlitz was lost. While General Mack’s role as commander in chief in another battle, Ulm, is prominently featured in the novel, we never learn, either from the narrator or from a character, that Kutuzov was the commander in chi$f at Austerlitz. Tolstoi’s novel added to the legend of Kutuzov’s greatness, which has become part and parcel of the Russian national mythology (overpopulated as it is by persons with military titles). In real life, the disaster of Austerlitz was unprecedented. Given their numerical strength and the positions they occupied, the allies seemed headed for a sure victory. Napoleon’s army was much smaller than that of the allies, and it was exhausted after a long march; it was also originally positioned at a disadvantageous place in the valley below the foothills of Pratzen, which it eventually stormed. To lose a battle in such circumstances was an act of a singular military ineptness.

While the works that tell the factual story inhabit mostly the reference rooms of academic libraries, War and Peace has shaped the perceptions of millions of people whose familiarity with Russian culture has been slight. Through War and Peace, Kutuzov became a hero not only to Russians but also to those who sympathize with Tolstoi’s magisterial presentation of that period of history. Whether the eventual defeat of Napoleon in Russia was due to Kutuzov’s brilliant plan, the bad Russian weather, or one of those unexplainable mistakes that great strategists sometimes make (and that occasion their downfall) is debatable. As for Tolstoi, he does not allow us to doubt that Kutuzov was a superb general and a war hero, and that Napoleon was defeated by him. Score quite a few more points for Tolstoi’s ability to weld together history and myth. In a marked contrast to the portrayal of Kutuzov, War and Peace offers perhaps the meanest picture of Napoleon ever drawn in literature. In Tolstoi’s rendition, the hero of Austerlitz was a conceited, stupid, fat dwarf who never understood either military strategy or life in general. In his Diary, Tolstoi was even more damning than in the novel. Having read little more about Napoleon than was obtainable in the works of the official Russian historian of the Napoleonic wars, A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, and in Adolphe Thiers’s Histoire du con sulat et de I’Empire, Tolstoi nevertheless juxtaposed Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I as follows: 25 [Napoleon]: vainglorious French villainy. The—deliberate—falseness of all the bulletins. The peace of Pressburg achieved by fraud. At the bridge of Arcole he fell into a puddle instead of seizing the standard. A poor rider. Carried off pictures and statues in the Italian war. . . . Rejoiced in the dead and wounded. Marriage to Josephine —success in society. . . . Complete madness, growing infirmity and insignificance on St Helena. Lies and greatness only because the dimension was great, but when the field of action became small, his insignificance became obvious. And a shameful death!

Alexander, a clever, amiable, sensitive man, seeking from on high greatness of dimension, seeking human heights. . . . Plans for a renascence of Europe. . . . Victory, triumph, greatness, grandeur, which frightened him, and the search for human greatness— greatness of mind. 26 These private musings about Napoleon’s unworthiness and Alexander’s magnificence shaped the image of Russian authority in War and Peace. That authority was achieved by belittling others in ways that would have been considered unworthy by critics were it not for Tolstoi’s novelistic skills. While the Englishspeaking world shares the Russians’ distaste for the French arriviste, there is no denying he was a military leader of genius. Austerlitz has generally been recognized as one of the great battles in history, a model of military strategy that is featured in the classic works on the subject. 27 In his dealings with soldiers and generals, Napoleon was not a mean man. While his behavior and speeches partook of the megalomania that is a common feature of people in power, he was more than a poseur. In no sense was he a destroyer of European cultures: his goal was rather self-aggrandizement and the imposition of new royal families on Europe. His meddling into these dynastic arrangements did not destroy national identities and sovereignties; on the contrary, some of his generals who started new dynasties became revered members of other nationhoods and states. But in War and Peace, he is presented as a narrow-minded buffoon and an oaf enamored of empty gestures and incapable of grasping the intricacies of military planning. Kutuzov, a sage, confronts Napoleon, a clown: surprisingly, Napoleon wins at Austerlitz. Kutuzov is presented as a quiet genius, one not lacking petty lusts (as in the scene with the priest’s wife, with whom, it is suggested, he has sex with her husband’s tacit permission), but nevertheless a man whose “fundamental option” is for the good, for the defense of the rodina. Napoleon, however, is irredeemable. An impression of his ineptness is reinforced by a false statistic concerning Napoleon’s Grande Armee: it was half the size Tolstoi said it was, four hundred thousand rather than eight hundred thousand. 28 While historians usually juxtapose Napoleon and Alexander, in War and Peace Tolstoi places

Kutuzov as Napoleon’s qui pro quo, and eventually his superior: another nuanced put-down for the emperor of the French. The process of inscribing myth onto history is also evident in regard to the Russian-Polish relations. The ideological pacification that Tolstoi applies to this subject is considerable. The novel contains several episodes about Poles who remained in Russian service during the Napoleonic campaign. These were mostly the powerful magnates from Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, for whom Russian protection guaranteed the stability of their social status. The vast majority of the literate and semiliterate Polish population was decidedly proNapoleon. The Polish national memory emphasizes the massive presence of Poles in Napoleon’s army: some eighty thousand, or one-fifth of Napoleon’s invading force. Napoleon’s army received broad support when it crossed the duchy of Warsaw and Lithuania on its way to Moscow, impoverished as the area was by wars, partitions, and confiscations. Perhaps one reason why Napoleon chose the northern instead of southern route to Moscow was anticipation of warm Polish support. Yet this spontaneous support is edited out of the novel by Tolstoi’s imperial pen, and foreign readers in particular never learn of the true state of affairs; they learn only that the Willarskis, the “Pzhebyshevskiis,” and the “Krizhanovskiis” (note the Russified spelling of the latter two names in Tolstoi’s text) remained in Russian service as generals (Krzyzanovski and Przybyszewski) or as statesmen (Prince Adam Czartoryski and the fictional character, Count Willarski). Tolstoi wrote of the warm reception the Russians got in Vilna (Vilnius, Wilno), but he never mentioned the enthusiastic support Napoleon received in the same city. What the reader thus hears is Tolstoi’s authoritative voice telling them that on Napoleon’s way to Moscow, there was no opposition of the colonized people to Russian rule. Indeed there were no colonized people to begin with: the Russian empire was a unified entity, virtually indistinguishable from ethnic Russia. The elbowing-out of historical information creates an impression of unity in the struggle against a foreign invasion. A reader familiar with only the Russian narratives of the Napoleonic wars (or indeed unfamiliar with the subject altogether) might conclude that the Poles played no

significant part either in the Napoleonic campaign or in the dynamism of the Russian empire in the early nineteenth century, that they were marginal and had no story to tell. Tolstoi felt no sympathy for either Poles or Lithuanians, as indicated by his readiness to leave his young wife and children (as well as the writing of War and Peace) when in 1863 a major Polish rising broke out. In a 1863 letter to Fet, he wrote, “What do you think of the Polish business? ... It looks bad! Shall we ... not be obliged to take down our swords from their rusty nails?” 29 In another letter he wrote, “For me it is a completely indifferent matter that the Poles are being oppressed.” 30 Waclaw Lednicki has argued that Tolstoi’s attitude to Poles was characterized by the standard Russian prejudices toward that nation, and he provides a detailed argument that it was so. 31 Lednicki says, “[Tolstoi’s] irony replaced a more justifiable attitude, that of a comprehension of the tragic political situation of Poland after the partitions. Poles had to depend upon Alexander I, as his subjects; on the other hand, they hoped Napoleon was bringing the liberation of their country.” 32 In a typically imperial fashion, Tolstoi remained deaf and blind to the limited range of activities from which the subaltern peoples were obliged to choose. He was familiar only with the possibilities open to the victorious nation, and his way of dealing with Others was either a belittling mockery (Napoleon) or an elbowing-out of inconvenient facts about the nonRussian subjects of the empire. The editing-out of the Polish narrative from remembered history was given a new impetus by War and Peace. At the time War and Peace was written, that narrative was already considered irrelevant, because Polish powerlessness was evident after a series of failed uprisings. The empire had arrived, and it could speak with a powerful voice, silencing the voices of the defeated and consigning them to cultural nonexistence—even at the time when the subjugated nation did in fact play a significant role. The distortions of history inevitably caused by empires consist of a number of such small adjustments, until a picture is created where no cultures except those supported

by large armies and navies are able to conduct a public conversation. The fact that Tolstoi felt no compunction in adjusting the scales as regards these matters is another sign of his imperial selfconfidence. Tolstoi trivialized the Polish thorn in Russia’s side and presented the empire as if it had achieved stability on its western border. 33 The treatment of Poles in War and Peace resonates with Edward Said’s analyses of certain European cultural happenings in Culture and Imperialism. Consider Said’s comments about Giuseppe Verdi’s composition of Aida. Unlike the other operas commissioned by European sponsors, this one was produced at the bidding of a native Egyptian, who paid handsomely for Verdi’s effort. While working for the European paymasters made Verdi pay attention to the interpretations present in his librettos (he did not want them to diverge from the internal point of view of the represented country or region), he felt no such constraint with regard to Egypt. That country belonged, after all, to a non-European world, and its claims on the European composer were either minimal or nonexistent. 34 Verdi felt as free in representing ancient Egypt as did Tolstoi in regard to the Russian empire’s non-Russian dominions. Thus the resplendent premiere of Aida in Cairo fell victim to all the prejudices of Orientalism. Similarly, in War and Peace Tolstoi superimposed on the history of Central and Eastern Europe a vision that corresponded to Russian political mythology. Just as Aida was a pseudo-Egyptian opera, so is the vision of Eastern and Central Europe adumbrated by Tolstoi and internalized by the Russian and world readers an example of Orientalization of the area. Score another point for imperial privilege. The demoting of Napoleon to the rank of a petty devil and streamlining the story of Russian imperial acquisitions helped to reinscribe in Russian memory an important segment of the constitutive myth of Russian nationhood, that of the tsar and his people. In a book oi) this topic, Michael Chemiavsky has argued that a close relationship between the two is fundamental to Russian identity. 35 Tsar Alexander I appears several times in the novel, and

each of these appearances reconfirms Chemiavsky’s analysis. Here is how Tolstoi reinforces this element of Russian national mythology. Shortly before the battle of Austerlitz, Tsar Alexander reviews his army. This is his first major appearance in the novel. It takes place before the battle is fought—that is to say, before the Russians are defeated. Had Alexander been introduced later, the lost battle would have diminished his stature. Tolstoi chose to introduce him at a point where nothing detracted from his glory as the father (, batiushka ) of the nation. Together with Alexander and his son, there appear on the field the Austrian emperor and the Austrian archduke, but by comparison with the Tsar they lack glamor. The Russian and Austrian armies are shown as being on equal and easy terms, the “smart clean troops. . . . thousands of feet and bayonets. ... the elegant pomaded officers.” 36 The Austrians and Russians are all fine comrades in arms, united by mutual respect, both equally civilized and both equally European. But while the enthusiasm of the Austrian troops for Emperor Francis is shown to be moderate, the Russian regiment responds to Alexander’s presence with a deafening “Hurrah!” The Russians are enthusiastic about their emperor, while the Austrians are lukewarm toward theirs. Either the Russians are more patriotic, or their emperor is more adorable: they score in either case. Then comes Nikolai Rostov’s reaction. Modeled after Tolstoi’s own father, Nikolai Rostov is an amiable if somewhat pedestrian character. He is untainted by Prince Andrei’s aloofness or by Pierre’s dissoluteness and indecision. He is the Russian Everyman. A loyal family member, he is eventually rewarded with a wealthy, wise, and faithful wife. Nikolai’s reaction to the tsar is therefore an Everyman’s reaction. An ordinary Russian meets the symbol of Russia, the tsar, and he reacts as a Russian should regardless of rank: “Rostov . . . felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word.”

37 Heroism or crime, fire or water, death or life: all of these can be commanded by the man who symbolizes Russian identity. There is no talk about God, honor, or country. Russia is the tsar, and the tsar is Russia. God and honor do not seem to be at issue. The narrator suggests that even a crime could and should be committed for the tsar. Yet Rostov is a kind and good-natured man, a person not prone to violence or criminality. Morality and decency are here subordinated to the Russian nation and to its autocratic ruler. At the core of Russia’s constitutive political myth as presented by War and Peace is not a messianic idea of Holy Russia (as narrated by Khomiakov and other nineteenth-century historiographers) but a submission to the power of the state. Unlike, say, the United States, whose constitutive political myth is associated with written documents rather than with the people in power, Russia’s political mythology revolves around the power of the state as personified by the state’s functionaries. To paraphrase Dostoevskii’s Shatov, Russians believe in Russia, and therefore they might believe in God. With such core mythology, aggressiveness cannot be far behind. Nikolai Rostov’s ecstasy continues: “How happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the fire this instant.” These thoughts occur to Rostov long before Napoleon invaded Russia: they occur to him as he fights for Russia on the soil of another Slavic nation (Austerlitz is in Czech lands) that had been subjugated by Austrians. The pervasiveness of imperialist attitudes in nineteenth-century Europe is well illustrated in this passage, and the fact that Tolstoi has not been taken to task over this and other such pas sages indicates that consent to nineteenth-century imperialism has been widespread among readers of War and Peace. Worshipful encounters with the tsar continue in different contexts. Nikolai’s younger brother Petia is just as ready to be the emperor’s slave as Nikolai. In 1812, while Napoleon pressed forward with his army, Petia could not enlist because of age, but he goes to see the emperor who is scheduled to appear before his subjects on the Kremlin grounds. Petia dresses up for the occasion and plans to ask for special permission to join the army. The crowd awaiting

Alexander’s arrival consists of representatives of all classes of society. By Tolstoi’s rendition, the attitude is one of children awaiting a quasi-metaphysical event. “Angel! Father! Master!” shouts the crowd. Like Nikolai, Petia is prepared “to kill himself and everyone else. . . . On both sides of him other people with similarly ferocious faces pushed forward.” 38 Petia manages to snatch one of the cookies that Alexander throws at the crowd. The symbolic value of this gesture is worth noting. The crowd is Russia: they are all “fed” by the Tsar (their kormitel') just as members of a household are fed by its head. He provides for them; he is their batiushka, both father and priest, according to Russian usage. But the food he provides depends on a whim; it might as well not have been disbursed. Alexander throws out these cookies on the spur of the moment. Had he not yielded to his fancy, the people would not have been fed. The Russian national myth is grounded in the acceptance of the tsar’s power: the tsar may fail the people, but he is a permanent fixture, and it is pointless to go against the permanent things. Petia’s wish is granted: he goes into the army and is killed in the war against the French. This is convenient indeed, for we can readily place him in the pantheon of Russian martyrs who defended their country when it was invaded by a French buffoon. But as indicated earlier, in 1812 there were several wars going on in Russia: the Caucasus and Central Asia were also war theaters at the time. In those territories, Russia was clearly the aggressor. Had Petia gone to the southern or the eastern front, would we have classified him as a youthful and innocent hero who perished for a just cause, a contributor to Russia’s political mythology? It is an uncomfortable question, and one that Tolstoi deftly avoids. Chemiavsky has noted that the myth of the all-powerful tsar has had as its companion the myth of the humble tsar. That myth began to be articulated during the reign of Ivan the Terrible: the tsar is allpowerful and all-good, and he can be terrible in his justice; but he is also ready to relinquish power to become a beggar, a wanderer, a

holy fool, a part of Holy Russia that exists spiritually within the secular space occupied by historical Russia. Thus a myth arose in Russian society that toward the .end of his reign Tsar Alexander I relinquished power to his brother Nicholas, left the royal surroundings in secrecy, and died in Siberia as a voluntary exile. Tolstoi presents this legend as truth in War and Peace: “Alexander I, having fulfilled his mission and feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the insignificance of that supposed power, turns away from it. . . saying only . . . ‘Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of God’.” 39 Nicholas I and his narrow soldier’s bed are a sideshow to the same drama. The imagined ritual of self-imposed humiliation added to the luster of the tsar’s power. If one looks at War and Peace as a work reconfirming the Russian imperial identity, then Tolstoi’s success in reshaping and representing history assumes greater importance than suggested by those critics who take the imperial privilege for granted. Postcolonial theory is typically concerned with deconstructing this privilege and looking at the seamy side of the imperial narrative. Seen from this perspective, War and Peace appears to be a colonialist novel in many respects, one that expresses Russia’s self-confidence as a colonial empire while at the same time suppressing the narratives of the defeated peoples. It is also, to borrow an expression from Lyotard, a grand narrative of legitimization of Russia’s imperial status. It presents Russia as a country possessed of a welldeveloped national consciousness, and it does so not by invoking that consciousness directly and therefore weakening its appeal to foreigners (as Dostoevskii does in The Idiot when Prince Myshkin recites the advantages of being Russian), but by contributing to the consolidating power of national mythology. To produce an imperial novel, i.e., a novel that reinforces imperial identity, the author has to represent and refashion the national memory both vertically, of across all classes of society, and laterally, or within the elite; and then show this united nation facing the Other.

While Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment are better structured and probe greater psychological depths, they are not as essential to the modem Russian self-perception as War and Peace. The novel put the finishing touches on the portrait of the Russian nation produced by imperial success. It so convincingly mediated between Russia’s colonial practices and its self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation-state that it congealed into the canonical version of Russian history not only for Russians but also for readers worldwide. Very few nations have ever succeeded in fashioning the world’s image of themselves in this way. NOTES 1. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiv. 2. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribners, 1974), 13. 3. This may be one of the reasons why the discourse that was critical of the fundamentals of the Russian state became radicalized so soon and resulted in a violent revolution. In Russia, in order to criticize, one had to leave the boundaries of an acceptable discourse, and thus the boundaries of everything that was permitted. While in the West political and economic radicalism became one of the subcurrents of the mainstream, in Russia the rupture was so complete that the radicals did not feel anchored in any Russian social institutions whatever; thus they rejected them all, wished to abolish all and start from ground zero. 4. N. N. Strakhov, quoted in Ernest Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (New York: Vintage, 1960), vol. 1, 313. Russian text of Strakhov’s remark in N. N. Strakhov, Kriticheskiia stat’i ob I. S. Turgeneve i L. N. Tolstom. Kiev: Izd. I. P. Matchenko, 1901. Reprinted by Mouton (The Hague, 1968). 5. Smith, 213.

6 . War and Peace, edited by George Gibian and translated by Aylmer Maude (New York: W. W. Norton, n.d.), 880. 7. Ibid., 462. 8 . Ibid., 553. 9. “Si tu peux, fas que ton ame arrive, / A force de rester studieuse et pensive, / Jusqu’a ce haut degre de stoique fierte / Ou, naissant dans les bois, j'ai tout d'abord monte. / Gemir, pleurer, prier, est egalement lache. / Fais energiquement ta longue et lourde tache / Dans la voie ou le Sort a voulu t’appeler, / Puis apres, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler.” Alfred de Vigny, “La Mort du Loup,” Poemes (Paris: Union Generate d’Editions, 1966), 255-58. 10. Seton-Watson, 122-23. 11. Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 135. 12. S. A. Grant has argued that mir and obshchina were Muscovite creations rather than ancient institutions. “ Obshchina and mir,” Slavic Review 35, no. 4 (1976). 13. Voina i mir (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1963), vol. 1, 163; War and Peace (Norton), 163-64. 14. Voina i mir, vol. 1,169; War and Peace (Norton), 169. 15. Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, translated by Mary Fleming Zirin (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989). 16. Peter J. Taylor, The Way the Modern World Works (New York: John Wiley, 1996), 193-211. 17. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, vol. 1,313.

18. Pisarev, “Old Gentry” [“ Staroe barstvo”], in War and Peace (Norton), 1377. 19. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated by Walter Arndt (New York: Dutton, 1963), 7. 20. Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), 165. 21. War and Peace (Norton), 9; Voina i mir, vol. 1, 12. 22. Davies, God's Playground, vol. 1,537; Chew, Atlas, 61. 23. “Uekhal v kievskuiu gubemiiu, gde nakhodilas bolshaia chast ego krest'ian.” Voina i mir, vol. 1,401; Norton, 409. 24. War and Peace (Norton), 564. 25. R. F. Christian, Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 111. 26. Tolstoy's Diaries, translated and edited by R. F. Christian, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners, 1985), 182-83. 27. R. E. Dupuy and T. N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 747-50. 28. Voina i mir, vol. 2, 89. 29. “Chto vy dumaete o polskikh delakh? Ved' delo-to plokho, ne pridetsia li nam s vami i s Borisovym snimat' opiat' mech s zarzhavevshego gvozdia?” Lev Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 61 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1953), 17. 30. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 61,115.

31. Waclaw Lednicki, Tolstoy between War and Peace (The Hague: Mouton, 1965). 32. Lednicki, 36-37. 33. Tolstoi changed his mind in later works, especially in Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1898), where Poles are counted among the most worthy inhabitants of the Russian empire, and where the narrator clearly condemns the execution of two political prisoners, a Pole named Lozinski and a Jew named Rozovski. 34. Said (1994), 117. 108 Imperial Knowledge 35. Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York: Random House, 1969). 36. War and Peace (Norton), 262. “Shchegolski vychishchenye i ubrannye voiska . . . tysiachi nog i shtykov . . . pripomazhennye, rasfranchennye ofitsery.” Voina i mir, vol. 1, 258. 37. War and Peace (Norton), 263. “Rostov . . . chustvoval, chto ot odnogo slova etogo cheloveka zaviselo to, chtoby vsia gromada eta (i on, sviazannyi s niei—nichtozhnaia peschinka) poshla by v ogon' i v vodu, na prestuplenie, na smert' ili na velichaishee geroistvo, i potomu-to on ne mog ne trepetat' i ne zamirat' pri vide etogo priblizhaiushchegosia slova,” Voina i mir, vol. 1, p. 259. 38. War and Peace (Norton), 747. 39. Ibid., 1263. 4

The Central Asian Narrative in Russian Letters In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said presented an analysis of Albert Camus’s novels that departs significantly from the canonical interpretation of the latter as a seeker of meaning in the meaningless world. Said’s interpretation dislodged Camus from his customary existential setting and placed him in the context of French imperialism. In so doing, Said seriously disturbed the taxonomy within which a variety of critics, from traditionalists to deconstructionists, had left Camus for the foreseeable future. Instead of reasserting Camus’s view on the human condition and reconfirming the validity of his modem antiheroes, Said reminded us that the plots of two of Camus’s novels, The Stranger [L’Etranger] (1942) and The Plague [La Peste ] (1947), unfold in Algeria and that their major protagonists are French colonialists; also, their point of reference is France rather than Algeria, and the experiences of the characters are French experiences. The narratives fit squarely within the tradition of French cultural history, while the history and traditions of the Arab world remain suppressed. True, remarks Said, Mersault kills an Arab, but “this Arab is not named and seems to be without a history, let alone a mother and father.” 1 Similarly, in The Plague the leading French characters have names and histories, whereas the Arabs are largely nameless and faceless. This, contends Said, is one indication of how the geography of Algeria was politicized by Camus and of how instead of being a territory in which the Arabs acted out their history, Algeria became a background against which the French were invited to play yet another historical role, that of benevolent victors taking possession of a land without memory and inscribing the history of France onto it, while erasing the experience of the conquered peoples. In Camus’s novels, much of what is pertinent to Algeria has been blocked off, and the reader is treated virtually exclusively to European perceptions and problems, as if it were possible to extend the boundaries of Europe by rhetorical

proclamation and without the conscious consent of the people involved. An accumulation of cultural presentations of the kind typified by Camus tends to create an impression that only the conqueror’s story is worth telling, that the conquered are culturally deaf and dumb. Such has been the classical and, until recently, a successful strategy of cultural appropriation in many parts of the world, contends Said. The nations committed to the ideology of expansionism have routinely used this strategy in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and, one might add, in Central and Eastern Europe—as witnessed by War and Peace, where the crafting of the imperial image necessitated wiping out the identities of the Central and Eastern European nations. Said’s critique of Camus shows that even the great moralists like Camus have not been free of the Orientalist proclivities characteristic of the age of colonialism. But while the Western European colonial experience has been subjected to numerous correction by critics like Said, the experience of Russians as imperialists remains concealed by the Russian critics’ nineteenth-century conceptual framework and by the vocabulary of Russian exceptionalism. Said has remarked that in some parts of the world the voluminous writings of colonialists have suppressed the weaker native voices to the point where recovery is bound to be slow and painful. This seems to be the case in the former republics of the USSR and in the so-called autonomous republics and regions within the “Russian” Federation. For some of these, the task has been made easier by their newly gained sovereignty. This chapter continues to argue that the ideological cover-up of colonial doings was not just a Western invention but has also been widely practiced by Russian writers. My focus is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward [Rakovyi korpus ] (1968) and its ideological predecessors. 2 When this novel first appeared, the reaction resembled the critics’ reaction to The Stranger, in the sense that commentators had no doubts about the novel’s subject matter and what it said to the reader. According to these early responses. Cancer Ward was a

novel about the horrors of the Soviet labor camps; it was also a novel about the human condition. Abraham Rothberg’s interpretation of Cancer Ward in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels is characteristic of these early analyses. 3 For Rothberg, the novel’s title symbolizes the disease of Sovietism that affected Russian society under Lenin and Stalin. He singles out autobiographical elements in the novel to build his argument about Russian suffering under the Soviet regime—as if any additional proofs were needed that such was indeed the case. He discusses the characters one by one: “the heir of Stalin,” Rusanov; the old and honest Bolshevik, Aleksei Shulubin; the generous and warm Russian physicians, Dontseva and Gangart; the charming medical student, Zoia; and last but not least, Solzhenitsyn’s alter ego, Oleg Kostoglotov. This brusque, underschooled, and likeable giant had spent years in the Gulag for a small act of defiance against the regime. As a result, he is damaged physically, professionally, and psychologically, but morally he has grown stronger. Rothberg spends considerable time on what he calls “Solzhenitsyn’s obsessions”: his hatred of injustice and his belief that literature does and should play a major role in the lives of the people of Russia. 4 A brief paragraph informs Rothberg’s readers that the action of Cancer Ward takes place in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, in 1955, and that duration of action is four months. Over the years. Cancer Ward became a classic of prison-camp literature, surpassing in sales the starker presentations of camp experience by Varlaam Shalamov or Jozef Czapski. The vast literature on Solzhenitsyn that followed and the publication of his other works confirmed the view that Solzhenitsyn articulated for Western readers the essential elements of the Soviet system of political suppression. Rothberg's view is essentially correct. Solzhenitsyn is indeed a spokesperson for those whom the Soviet regime wronged, and there were millions of such people. But this rather obvious aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s opus has effectively blocked off other elements of his novels, particularly his rhetorical appropriation of Soviet territory for the benefit of Russian colonialism. Like Camus’s “French” stories

placed in a bland Arab world, Cancer Ward overlays an invisible undercurrent of Uzbek and Kazakh history. For readers without an awareness of this undercurrent or of previous attempts by Russian writers to present Central Asia as Russia’s territory, the novel’s colonial aspect is bound to remain obscure. Cancer Ward leaves an impression that Tashkent was largely populated by Russians or Russified Uzbeks, for whom Russian rule presented no problems (other than the common problem of Soviet oppression, which touched Russians and non-Russians alike). In reality, it was primarily a mixed Uzbek-KazakhTatar city, with only a thin layer of Russianness imposed on it by administrative order. The orientalism of Taskhent, however, is entirely subsumed by the plot, which assumes the centrality of Russian culture in that area. A great deal of Central Asian history has been wiped out by this presentation. COLONIZING CENTRAL ASIA Here is some of this absent background. The action of Cancer Ward unfolds in a city first captured by Russians on 17 June 1865, or fiftythree years before Solzhenitsyn was bom. In 1865, Tashkent was a booming oasis in an area perpetually short of water, and it had a mixed Kazakh-Uzbek population. 5 According to Russian sources, it had a hundred thousand inhabitants when it surrendered to the Russian army. 6 The Russians attacked Tashkent, then the capital of the khanate of Kokand, in 1864; they annexed the khanate in 1875, after a prolonged war in which the Russian general, Mikhail Cherniaev, distinguished himself by exceptional cruelty. The area was later renamed the Fergana region, and it went by that name under the Soviets. The conquest of Kokand and of other Central Asian khanates had been preceded by several decades of duplicitous diplomacy. Russian designs on Central Asia first became apparent in 1858,Avhen Tsar Alexander II sent Count N. P. Ignat'ev as an envoy to the khandte of Khiva. Ignat'ev was supposed to negotiate a trade agreement, but his real goal was intelligence gathering. His visit ended on an amicable note, Ignat'ev assuring the khan that Russia

had peaceful intentions. In 1864, partly on the basis of the information Ignat'ev and his successors had procured, Alexander II started his campaign against the Turkomen. He was successful, and the fall of Tashkent constituted the turning point in the war against the Turkic population of the region. In 1867, Alexander II appointed Gen. K. P. von Kaufman as the first governor-general of the province of Turke stan. In 1873, the attack on Khiva began. While it was in progress, Alexander dispatched Count P. A. Shuvalov to Lonc(on to assure the British government that he did not intend to occupy or annex the khanate—but he did not keep his word. In the same year, the Russians attacked the city of Khiva, took it, and declared it a protectorate of Russia. In 1875, a rebellion broke out in Turkestan, and Gen. M. D. Skobelev was dispatched to quell it. After the pacification by Skobelev, there was no more talk of the protectorate. By 1876, both Khiva and Kokand were absorbed by the Russian empire. 7 The government-sponsored resettling of Russians from Russia to Tashkent had begun. In 1885, 4,145 Russians moved there, and by 1905 the number of Russians had grown to 18,877. 8 Within a generation, Chemiaev, Skobelev, von Kaufman, and N. P. Lomakin had entered the Russian nationalist mythology as icons of righteousness and probity. The most poignant literary expression of this political myth can be found in Nikolai Gumilev’s poem “The Turkestani Generals” [“Turkestanskie generaly”] (1907). 9 Gumilev’s poem begins with a description of the life of the Russian upper classes: balls and receptions in wealthy private homes. This “deadening nectar of jet-set life” ( mertviashchee upoenie sveta), which already Pushkin had condemned, is evoked in the poem as a backdrop against which are displayed the noble figures of the old generals. They are tall and upright, their eyes bright, and their manner kind. They are surrounded by the “noble legend” ( blagoukhaiushchaia legenda) of their exotic exploits. What is suggested here is not the martial qualities of the generals but rather their similarity to the Russian saints, whose humility was proverbial. Later in the poem, the loss of a Russian army unit is mourned: here

again Russians are presented as those to whom harm had been done rather than those who had inflicted harm on others. Finally, the conquered cities are named—Ust'-Kuduk and Kinderli —and the words of the colonialist triumph are invoked: “the Russian flag over the white city of Khiva” ( russkii flag nad beloi Khivoi). 10 This last phrase, “the Russian flag over the white Khiva,” deserves a second look. Amidst the jingoism of empires that over the centuries have invaded, annexed, and destroyed the weaker nations and ethnicities of the world, one seldom encounters phrases expressing so succinctly the will to power and the attraction to violence that mar human history. Awareness of the fact that Gumilev’s poem and other similar works of Russian literature commemorate a jubilant pressing forward to annihilate others is entirely missing in Russian intellectual life. Naturally, one would not expect an apology (empires hardly ever apologize), just an occasional signal that the issue has been acknowledged: among the wars fought by Russia, quite a few were morally ambivalent. But such signals are missing. Why should the Russians rejoice that the Russian flag was waving over a city inhabited by a Central Asian people with whom Russians had little in common and whose architecture ( belaia Khiva) was very much unlike the landscape of Russian towns and cities? A desire for more land, that perennial desire of nations facing rapid demographic growth, was hardly a factor in Russia, which has always ranked among the least densely populated states in the world. Nor did the The Central Asian Narrative in Russian Letters 113 conquest of Khiva bring any tangible benefits to ordinary Russians. Gumilev and others rejoiced over the surrender to the Russian army of cities far beyond Russia’s ethnic borders. While the standard rhetoric of nationalism requires such expressions of joy, nations have usually moderated it by works and statements in which nationalism is prominently absent or the moral ambiguities of imperialistic enterprise are invoked. But in Gumilev’s writings about Russia’s

imperial drive into Central Asia and other parts of the world not a trace can be found of a suggestion that Russia’s successful imperialism had taken the nation down a wrong road. Gumilev’s victorious generals are predecessors of Solzhenitsyn’s kind doctors and orderlies, who take care of the miserable natives even in conditions of universal privation and suffering. Solzhenitsyn’s Russian colonialists are cultivated and refined, modest and gentle, somewhat like the Russian nationals in Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum during the 1829 Campaign who supplied the “Asiatic” wilderness with roads, parks, and bath buildings. In Russian literature generally, one observes a tendency to ascribe virtue rather than strength to military conquerers. In Journey to Arzrum, General Ermolov is described as a kind person who devoted his retirement years to the village in which he had lived, leaving it only to visit his elderly father, a simple and pious man. We further learn from Pushkin that this awe-inspiring general kept an open house for everyone except city officials, the implication being that ordinary peasants had access to him while the chinovniki (who have had a bad reputation in Russian letters) did not. Pushkin’s Ermolov is a predecessor of Gumilev’s Turkestani generals, a paragon of righteousness who had brought enlightenment and civilization to the lesser races. One gets an impression that Pushkin’s goal was to make him revered more for his alleged virtues than for his military successes. 11 This nationalist fantasy goes further back to Nikolai Karamzin, who in his History maintained that Muscovy had been able to enlarge its dominions because of its moral influence, and not because it knew how to use the sword effectively. The myth of Russia’s peaceful expansion has persisted in Russian literature in various forms, and the stereotype of the refined elderly general (or other military officer) is one of its most common manifestations. In Eugene Onegin, Tatiana ends up marrying an old general who, as she puts it, is favored by the court ( ego laskaet dvor). What could be the reason for bestowing so many favors on the old man? As Allen Chew’s Atlas shows, a variety of military ventures could have endeared Tatiana’s husband to the court of

Alexander I or Paul I, among them the pacification of the Caucasus, the suppression of Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s rising in 1794, or the early ventures into Central Asia. But the general’s past is obscured by his generous smile, his lack of vanity, his perfect manners, and the friendliness with which he greets Eugene and introduces him to his wife, in the mistaken belief that the two had never met. The old general is all probity and kindness, and he is rewarded with Tatiana’s fidelity. 12 In Solzhenitsyn s Cancer Ward, the Russians likewise overflow with kindness toward the Uzbeks. It is as if Solzhenitsyn is arguing with imaginary adversaries, trying to prove to them that in such circumstances, any talk about colonial oppression is totally misdirected. The title of Gumilev’s poem is an exercise in what has been called the “appropriation of an alien geography”: “The Turkestani Generals.” The ideological meaning of this phrase can be gauged by substituting for the Russian conquest of Central Asia a successful conquest of the Soviet Union by Hitler, and by imagining future German poets’ references to such generals as Heinz Guderian and Friedrich von Paulus as “the Russian generals.” The geographical imperialism of the title echoes Albert Camus’s Algeria, which likewise became a barren stage on which French tragedies about the human condition could be enacted by French actors. As soon as the Russians established their military presence in Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s, the taking of the war bounty began. “From the earliest days of the Russian invasion, the occupation authorities and their subordinates had taken away thousands of Central Asian objects, of all sizes and kinds, as trophies or plunder which they shipped to Saint Petersburg or Moscow,” says an American scholar specializing in the region. 13 When General von Kaufman was named military governor of Turkestan, he “plundered the movable symbols of sovereignty as well as the records of intellectual life and history from Central Asia.” Among the objects that depleted Uzbek history and enriched that of the Russians were the silver throne of the khans (now part of the Oruzheinaia Palata section of the Kremlin Museum), numerous

medieval manuscripts (ifccluding the Qu’ran), ancient vessels from mosques, and other artistic objects. Whatever could not be taken was destroyed or desecrated: cemeteries, historical buildings, and royal tombstones. In the 1870s, the massive looting of Turkestani art treasures was thus described by one participant in the plundering: Many of our public collections and museums, thanks to von Kaufman, were enriched with the most precious objects . . . and ... a huge quantity of Arabic, Persian, Central Asian, and other Eastern manuscripts. In the Aziatskii Muzei of our Academy of Science there is also a mass of precious manuscripts received from Central Asia; an abundance of gold and silver jewelry and equestrian ornaments, money, and the seal of the Khivan khans grace the collections of the Tsarskoselskii Arsenal . 14 Edward Allworth points out that the looting continued well into Soviet times. Thus, the Hermitage Museum received objects from Central Asia during Solzhenitsyn’s lifetime. “The continuing pattern of Russian policy seemingly meant to deprive Central Asians of their most significant symbolic monuments—ancient, medieval and modem.” 15 The looting abated in the post-Soviet period, when local protests began to be staged throughout Central Asia, including parts of the “Russian” Federation. In an archeological dig in the 1990s, several 2,500-year-old mummies, believed to be Scythian warriors, were found in the Altai area of the Federation, on the Ukok Plateau on the border of Mongolia. They were transported to Moscow, but in 1995 the Altai Republic’s legislature passed a law forbidding the looting of national treasures and their removal from the region. The republic’s Moscow representative, Aleksandr Manzyrov, de dared, “It is our national treasure. Why should it be taken away?” The Russians responded that the mummies would be returned if their preservation could be assured. “No one is stealing anything from anyone,” they assured the “natives.” 16 One recalls that a similar argument was used in regard to the Elgin Marbles when in 1816 they were transported from Greece to England and sold to the

British Museum. Another act of post-Soviet defiance was a conference held in Ankara in 1993, during which scholars from all the newly independent states of Central Asia agreed to adopt the Latin alphabet, with some variations subsequently agreed upon for the Uzbek language. 17 ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN’S RHETORIC OF DISPOSSESSION At one point in his military career, Solzhenitsyn was a battery commander near Leningrad. Then, or during his school years, he might have seen the Central Asian bounty while visiting the Hermitage, a pilgrimage that every educated Russian was bound to make. There is no indication in Cancer Ward that even a momentary reflection on the Russian role in that sordid colonial episode had ever overtaken its author, otherwise well attuned to human suffering. Beneath the layers of matter-of-factness in Cancer Ward and its apparent neutrality toward the Russian-Turkestani conflict, beneath the benevolence of Doctors Dontseva and Gangart toward the poor and uneducated “Tatar” cancer patients, there slumbers an attitude expressed in Dostoevskii’s Diary of a Writer for 1880: a rejoicing over the pacification ( usmirenie) of the Turkomen. 18 The Russian colonialist rhetoric has clearly been internalized by the major Russian writers, while the muted voices of Uzbek writers recording the Soviet and tsarist rule can be found mainly in books read only by academic specialists. In the novel’s first edition, Tashkent is nowhere mentioned by name, as if it was not worthy of being named. Its only distinction as a city lies in hosting a Russian-operated hospital. Characteristically, Camus used the same device of de-naming places, people, and objects in the territories undergoing French colonization. In his novels, the cities of Algeria are often nameless, while Oran is described as just a French outpost (, rien de plus qu’une prefecture frangaise de la cote algerienne). Likewise, during his trip to the hospital, Oleg Kostoglotov’s internal monologue does not register Tashkent as a foreign city under Soviet Russian military occupation

or as a city whose architecture, population, and atmosphere differed markedly from the sights to which a Russian might be accustomed. The narrator obscures the fact that the city was a center of a different ethnicity, with all the memories and mythologies accompanying it. It might as well have been Leningrad or Vologda, so far as the realities in which the Russian characters lived were concerned. Nowhere is there a trace of an acknowledgement that Tashkent, like Moscow, partakes in some way of that focused longing that informed Chekhov’s Three Sisters and that ethnic capitals usually enjoy. Kostoglotov’s illness does not fully explain the blocking-off of nonRussian reality. The narrator’s studious blindness continues throughout Kostoglotov’s stay in the hospital, his flirtation with two women, his conversations with several men, and finally his release as one of the few lucky patients who beat cancer. Tashkent’s distinctiveness is obliterated in other ways as well. Its geographical location is trivialized throughout the novel. We learn from Kostoglotov and Zoia that Tashkent is just one of the many spots in “their” vast country where they were entitled to settle, indeed, where they were welcome—spots that waited for Russian presence and needed the doctors Russia gave them, needed the hospitals Russia built and the culture it implanted. Such places were countless, suggest the conversations imbedded in the plot. Unwittingly perhaps, Solzhenitsyn echoes Prince A. M. Gorchakov, minister of foreign affairs under Alexander II, who in a note to the European powers dated 21 November 1864 argued that “as a civilizing Power comes into contact with one barbarous tribe and is forced to subdue it in the interests of order, it is brought into conflict with the tribe dwelling beyond it, and so the boundary of civilization is inevitably extended.” 19 Gorchakov compared British expansion in North America to Russian expansion in Central Asia: civilizing missions both. A century later, the results of both expansions could be compared. The results of the Russian conquest of Tashkent were clear in Solzhenitsyn’s time as well, for those who wished to see them. Under Russian rule, Central Asia had become perhaps the most desolate part of the planet, a place that saw neither capitalist enterprise nor the transfer of the know-how from the “civilizing”

power. Its infrequent risings, such as the Quorbachi rebellion of the 1920s, were quickly suppressed. In the 1990s, infarft mortality in certain areas of Uzbekistan was higher than in some sub-Saharan African countries notorious for their poverty and lack of medical infrastructure. 20 Interestingly, in 1868, or shortly after assuming control of Tashkent, the Russians established there a military hospital. 21 It hardly needs saying that from the point of view of the Turkomen, it was not a welcome institution. The hospital was meant to serve the occupying power. Perhaps in addition to his own medical history, a memory of this hospital inspired Solzhenitsyn to place his cancer ward in the Uzbek capital. At the time when Solzhenitsyn came to Tashkent as a cancer victim, the city had a million inhabitants, mostly Muslims, and it was the seat of the Muslim Board of the USSR 22 It was also the Russiandesignated capital of the Uzbeks, whom the Russians had promoted at the expense of the Kazakhs, who also lived in Tashkent. In the Middle Ages, Tashkent had been a cultural center of the Turkic population, and it remained a major Turkestani city under Russian rule. In the twentieth century, it would probably have continued as a melting pot for the Turkic nationality had the Russians not split the various weakening ethnicities into separate groups, according to the maxim of divide et impera. Uzbeks were pitted against Kazakhs, while writers like Solzhenitsyn called the natives “Tatars.” A Central Asian scholar observed that tsarist administration sought to fragment the Central Asians as much as possible and applied varied (and changing) ethnonyms and legal designations to these fragments. The process was repeated, with new variations, under Soviet rule. In addition, Soviet functionaries in the 1930s “discovered” and officially established “new” languages such as Uzbek, Kazakh, and others, so that Central Asians “had to have” translators to communicate with each other or, preferably, to adopt Russian as their lingua franca. 23

In the 1920s, Moscow suppressed the reborn Turkic movement in Tashkent and established control over the cultural life of the city. In Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinski remarks that the October Revolution in Tashkent consisted of a declaration of war by one group of Russians on another group of Russians. For the Turkomen, it meant that the Russian rule continued. 24 Under the Soviets, the Arabic alphabet was changed to Cyrillic, literary monuments were purged of anti-Russian elements, and a new cultural canon was enforced. “The system of indirect rule, once invented by the British and used in Asia and Africa, was taken over by Moscow and enabled the Russians to operate with a virtually total unaccountability,” remarks Kapuscinski. 25 Pamphlets were published tailoring Central Asian history to Russian needs. One such pamphlet strove to establish the primacy, of the Uzbeks over other ethnicities: “Because the pamphlet came from a Russian and circulated in the Russian language, it gained further ideological weight,” says Allworth. 26 This effort paralleled Western historians’ efforts to rewrite histories of the conquered nations, including some European nations. 27 Russian publishing houses, universities, and schools gained monopoly over the UzbekKazakh schools and population, whose language, still in the process of evolving into a separate Turkic tongue, or tongues, was deprived of an opportunity to generate modem vocabulary in culture, technology, and science. The Russian language came too late to destroy the Central Asian identity, but it stunted and distorted its development considerably. Russian language journals, such as Literatura i iskusstvo Uzbekistana and Pravda Vostoka explained to the natives what their art and history were all about. 28 To advance in any career, one had to master Russian. For the ambitious and the desperate, cultural Russification was not far behind. Since bilingual schools were scarce and inferior to Russian schools, a knowledge of Russian was acquired at the expense of the native tongue. 29 Allworth summarized these developments as follows: “Soviet Central Asian political authorities took Uzbekistan’s cultural heritage over an extremely costly, convoluted route between 1922 and 1941. . . . That maneuver . . . sharply limited the accessible heritage, replaced the leading Central Asian intellectuals with a compliant cultural

establishment, and terrorized the populace. That seems to have been the aim of the entire effort. The suppression of subaltern populations in the Soviet empire’s western rim has been recorded in numerous English-language publications, but other suppressions (the Uzbek revolt in the 1920s or, farther east, the slaughter of half the population in the Mongolian capital, Urga, by General R. Ungem von Sternberg, nicknamed “the bloody baron”) liave not been so recorded. The reeducation or elimination of the Central Asian elites in the 1920s guaranteed that it would take a long time for Russia’s Asian colonies to acquire an audible voice. So distasteful was the memory of the Uzbek insurrection to the Moscow ideologists that the word mujahid, or “warrior for the faith,” was removed from Uzbek dictionaries published in the Soviet Union, although earlier dictionaries had carried it. These massive efforts did not destroy the Uzbeks’ attachment to their own identity. As late as 1979, 98.82 percent of Uzbeks in the republic claimed Uzbek as their first language. 32 Within a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the city of Tashkent dumped its Soviet-era street and district names, replacing Russian and socialist heroes by native sons or by Muslim personalities. Since Turkey had long been regarded as a model to emulate by the secular Uzbek elites, Kirov Street became Ataturk Street; Likhachev Street was changed to Baikaro Street, while October Street became Shaikhantakhurskii Street. Frederic Engels gave way to Amir Temur, Khmel'nitskii to Kushbegi, Kuibyshev to Mirzo-Ulugbekskii. Altogether, virtually all Russiaoriented names were dumped. 33 Some demographers say that by 2105 the Uzbeks will have become the most numerous of all the former Soviet nationalities, surpassing even the Russians. 34 Such is the context of Solzhenitsyn’s novel —the nineteenth-century bounty taking, Soviet purges, strategic efforts to destroy Turkestani identity, the mushrooming of monuments to Turkestan’s defeats, in which Tashkent abounds and which the “natives” view with the kind

of bitterness that Russians experience recalling the damage to Leningrad during the Nazi siege. Yet not a trace of Turkestani woes can be found in the novel. The native background to the story is blocked off so effectively that many readers have taken Cancer Ward for a novel about Russia, placed somewhere in a remote Asian corner of that vast nation to be sure, but Russia nevertheless. The authority of the Russian observer permeates the plot line and the reflections about life and death with which Solzhenitsyn peppers his narrative. The characters display an exclusively Russian consciousness. They did not acquire loyalty to the land that had given them or their parents shelter from war and destitution. In that respect, Doctors Dontseva and Gangart are like Pechorin and Maksim Maksimych, who likewise did not develop a loyalty to the Caucasus. There is not a trace in Cancer Ward of two societies in conflict. These absences resemble the retouched Soviet-era photographs from which the disgraced members of the party have been removed: instead of faces, background slogans; instead of stories, silences. The thoroughness with which Solzhenitsyn accomplished these erasures, coupled with his usual didacticism concerning morality, damage the innocence of the silence that he imposed upon the Turkomen. Kostoglotov and a host of other Russians in the novel block out the voices of authentic Tashkent a bit too disingenuously, while the novel’s narrator insists that the Russians performed many good deeds for the natives. The lady doth protest too much. In the hospital, Russian superiority is played out by means of conversations and turns of the plot. Homi Bhabha insists that any such colonial discourse is fractured by contradictions and anxieties that the supposed superiority of the colonialist produces, but there is little evidence of such fractures in Solzhenitsyn. The Russians are monologic and confident, the Tatars simple-minded and ready to take instruction. Sharaf Sibgatov, a “Tatar,” begs Kostoglotov to instruct him about the true cure for cancer: “Let us talk, Oleg, about the birch cure with which you began,” Sibgatov asked. “But please tell it all from the beginning, Oleg!” Kostoglotov obliged. “If one is to start from the beginning, Sharaf, here is how it goes. That other

patient told me about Dr. Maslennikov, an old country doctor of the Alexandrovskii county near Moscow.” 35 Another “Tatar,” Akhmadzhan, asks Vadim Zatsyrko, a Russian, about the natives of the Enisei region whom Zatsyrko met in his extensive travels: “Tell me, how do those Evenks dress?” 36 Like Kostoglotov, Vadim obliges: the locals need to be instructed, in the best colonialist fashion. Nowhere in this novel is it suggested that the Russians have learned anything from the Uzbeks. Doctor Dontseva is said to travel from Moscow to Baku in her search for cures for cancer. This noble endeavor resonates against an inability of natives to travel anywhere, particularly to Moscow. Moscow can come to them on its civilizational mission, but they cannot go there: the usual pattern of activity in a colonialist milieu. A peculiarity of Russian colonialism is the double barrier that prevents the natives from going to and staying in the metropolis. One obstacle is the lack of financial means and a passport to travel, another is the lack of a propiska, or permit to live in the metropolis. One cannot obtain a propiska without having a job, and one cannot get a job without a propiska. The propiska was made illegal after the fall of the Soviet Union, but this law has not been enforced. In Moscow in the 1990s, persons of Central Asian or Caucasus appearance are still hunted by the police and are sometimes beaten up by ordinary citizens. 37 Each hospital conversation is an enactment of Russian power over the locals. Taken together, these conversations inform us that this portion of the world is under Russia’s rightful control. Solzhenitsyn enacts the scenario that Sabirzyan Badretdinov analyzed in other Russian novels: the natives are naive and simpleminded, the Russians understanding and patient. 38 By means of such rhetoric Central Asia was being made Russian, just as Siberia had been made Russian by an even longer tradition of peopling it, however sparsely, with Russian generals and soldiers, prisoners and exiles, geologists and ethnographers, and finally with Russian literary characters, who enacted Russian problems in a non-Russian territory, thus appropriating it for the empire. The authority of writers, institutions, and governments accrues to the initial representation of

colonies by their conquerors, surrounding these representations with prestige and inviolability. Such expertise and authority are not easily dislodged. 39 In Cancer Ward, the only native designated as an educated person is Doctor Nizamudtin Bakhramovich, his Turkic surname distorted by a Russian suffix. He is the titular head of the hospital, but he makes a poor job of it, according to the narrator. His failure to care for the patients and staff is the only characteristic Solzhenitsyn ascribes to him. He remains a repulsive paper figure, never present as a human being and never engaging in significant action. The only comment he is allowed to make shows him to be an insensitive and unconcerned bureaucrat. He says the following about the shortage of cleaning rags: “If the ministry of health did not provide them, I' cannot buy them myself with my own money ” 40 Possibly Solzhenitsyn heard a similar comment from an Uzbek when he himself lay in a hospital bed in Tashkent. In the novel, the good Russian doctors and orderlies do, of course, mobilize to provide the missing items. Unwittingly, however, Solzhenitsyn might have recorded here what Homi Bhabha calls a refusal to submit to “colonial mimicry.” It consists of a deliberate misreading of the colonialist’s orders or misinterpretation of his ostensible purpose. The Russians demanded that the orders of the various ministries be observed: to do otherwise would bring about a severe punishment. Could the Uzbek’s remark be sarcasm, referring to the painful reality that the Moscow ministry is in charge of the smallest details in his country and in his hospital? In the non-Russian union republics of the USSR, the first party secretary was of native parentage, while the second secretary was always of Russian nationality and was the real boss, says Helene Carrere-d’Encausse 41 The ministries in Moscow were run largely by Russians or Russified members of other nationalities. In its ostensible submission to the rules of the game imposed by the colonizer, the peevish comment of the colonized native may be a destabilizing ironic compromise; it may be a fake submission, a way of subverting the colonialist enterprise by refusing to contribute to the law and order that the colonialist wished to introduce in the colony. In

the Russian case, this wish for order was in itself pregnant with irony, for orderliness had been a postulate but not an achievement of the colonizing culture. Solzhenitsyn’s desire to record faithfully the behavior of “natives” that he himself observed while being a patient in Tashkent might have delivered more than he had bargained for. The Russian literary critic Igor' Zotov has said that the spectacular failure of the post -Gulag Archipelago works of Solzhenitsyn is traceable to the poverty of the writer’s imagination. 42 Solzhenitsyn is interested in instructing people how to interpret history correctly, says Zotov. As a writer, he had the good fortune to witness quite a bit of history, and he captured his remembrances in The Gulag Archipelago. But the rest of Russian history he learned from books which, one might add, desensitized him to the issue of colonial exploitation. The canonical history of Russia that Solzhenitsyn learned from Soviet and tsarist textbooks covered up another kind of history, one that the Russian power classes did not wish to uncover. Zotov contends that as soon as Solzhenitsyn established himself as a major writer, he devoted himself to being a handmaiden of Russophile ideology. His passionate desire to see Russia prosper and the Russian people realize their best potential ultimately prevailed over his artistic sense. Instead of writing novels, he began to write political tracts, finally producing that pretentious romanfleuve, The Red Wheel (1971-93). Zotov’s remarks are relevant to Cancer Ward, even though this novel preceded The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s didacticism ran strong even before The Gulag Archipelago was completed. In Cancer Ward, he appropriated Uzbekistan for Russia while at the same time presenting a 1950s collection of Russian women and men that best suited his dream of Russians who have reached a state of moral maturity and superiority. His highly educated Russian females, Doctors Dontseva and Gangart, as well as Professor Oreshchenkov, drafted according to the best models of nineteenth-century fabulators, are wooden characters representing Solzhenitsyn’s desire to bring high moral standards to Russian life. However commendable this desire is, it is made impotent by the author’s

yielding to the pathology of power. His Russian women excel in the professional arena, yet they find time to be nurturing at home and at work—not to speak of being good buddies. Professor Oreshchenkov is wisdom incarnate, and the perfection of his little house resembles, mutatis mutandis, the perfection of Mansfield Park in Jane Austen’s novel of that title. Doctor Dontseva s generous and charitable ministrations to Sibgatov and his like have as their background military violence and the wrecking of the fragile Uzbek economy for the sake of Russian cotton mills. Unlike Jane Austen, however, Solzhenitsyn seems consciously to shield the reader from these ambiguities. His studious lack of attention to national problems betrays his unease with any criticism of the Russian polity that does not have communist ideology as its sole target. From the perspective of postcolonial theory, Solzhenitsyn’s didacticism is disingenuous. In defiance of actual trends, he makes Kapitolina Matveevna Rusanova bear four children, as if anticipating the hoped-for demographic shift in Central Asia, where the Muslim population grew by leaps and bounds in his lifetime. He must have been familiar with the actual demographic trends, and these suggested that the Russian apparatchiks typically had one or two children, whereas the Uzbeks had thrice that number. 43 Rusanov himself, while repulsive, possesses nevertheless the dignity of a man who personally did not torture or kill anyone. Not so the Tatar Akhmadzhan, an unrepentant Gulag guard and one of those repugnant communist types who committed crimes against the zeks day after day and year after year, never relenting or having a change of heart. Akhmadzhan insists that the zeks “are not people,” that they are being overfed. 44 When pressed, he says that it is not his business to ask questions: that is the domain of those at the top. At the top, Solzhenitsyn suggests, was Lavrentii Beria (a Mingrelian from Georgia), and Stalin himself (a Georgian). One is led to conclude that the Russians were not masters of the vast Gulag empire, that under the Soviets the center somehow ceased to matter

and the criminal periphery took over. At least Cecil Rhodes did not insist that he was the colonized peoples’ victim. The distribution of various cancers, or stages of cancer, and the conditions in which the patients live are likewise shaded to consolidate Russian authority. The Tatar Sibgatov’s cot is located outside the ward, thus depriving him even of the shred of privacy that a bed and bedstead in the ward might offer. One can hardly envisage an ethnic Russian being deprived of these small comforts in a hospital in a non-Russian republic, where Russians always came first. Sibgatov s cancer is particularly hideous and smelly, and it necessitates baths, or imitations thereof, which are unstintingly administered by Russian orderlies. Sibgatov is thus placed in a position of total dependence, political, social, and personal, becoming a recipient of kindness and charity from a member of the colonizing nationality. The narrator ascribes to him an angelic disposition how convenient, as the Church Lady might say. While Rusanov, the party boss, is clearly not the author’s favorite, his anticipated demise will happen in the comfort of his home, far from the backbreaking work to which Sibgatov owes his injury, cancer, and ultimately death. An accumulation of such ethnically determined images creates an associative effect. The disabling mode that is thus created is well known to Americans who protest the discriminatory images of certain minorities in the media. Repeated presentations of members of certain ethnic groups as losers and failures create a cumulative impression that is particularly destructive with regard to the young and impressionable members of that minority. Those who protest such regularities do not call for quotas; rather, they call for a toning down of appeals to easy stereotypes. Admittedly this is not easily done, but this difficulty does not deny the validity of the complaint. That this apportioning of success and failure is also promoted through literature is no surprise; postcolonial theory has pointed out a number of cases in Western literatures where various non white groups are presented with less than evenhandedness. The fact that the Tatars in Solzhenitsyn’s novel are perpetual losers and that the only achievers in the novel

are Russians contributes to the ethnic stereotyping that underscores the inferior identity of the Other. In colonial conditions, the fact that Kostoglotov recovers from cancer goes beyond the universal ethical significance with which the critics have endowed this recovery. Granted, Kostoglotov’s recovery is a symbol of his moral victory over the Gulag masters, but it is more than that. It is also a contribution to the stereotype of the victorious Russian. It has to do with the range of opportunities open to Russians within the empire. Kostoglotov’s Russianness vouchsafes for him a place in the vast patchwork of territories called the USSR. As a Russian, he can expect a future either in Moscow or in Tashkent, because he is nowhere a stranger. His recovery is symbolic of the chances for development and action that Russians had in the USSR, while Sibgatov’s anticipated death symbolizes the decline of the native. That life proved Solzhenitsyn wrong in this respect is the final and unintended irony of the novel. Cancer Ward, is peppered with references to “our country” or to “the wide world for all of us”—made by Russians, but never by natives. “Our homeland Is so large,” says Zoia. “I am in my own homeland,” says Kostoglotov. “The world treats everyone the same way,” Aunt Stefa assures Demka, a fellow Russian: a perception of those who have never experienced ethnic discrimination. “You do not love your homeland, you just love your pension, while I love my homeland!” exclaims Kostoglotov. Moscow is the measure of everything, from happiness to dances. 45 For Sibgatov or Abdullakhimov, to speak of Moscow as “our country” would be absurd. Yet Zoia, a Russian medical student, when asked where she would work after graduating, shrugs her shoulders and says, “Our country is so large.” The assumption is that she would be welcome anywhere within the Soviet domain. No such ejaculation originates with an Uzbek. When Vega Gangart fusses over Kostoglotov’s condition in the waiting room, he replies defiantly: “I am in my rodina here, why should I feel embarrassed?” 46 Yet the narrator is aware that Tashkent is not Russia: shortly afterwards, he remarks of Kostoglotov that he could not return to Russia {no zapreshchen byl emu put' v Rossiiu). Moscow’s centrality is repeatedly asserted, sometimes with unintended irony, as when that typical Russian apparatchitsa, Avieta

Rusanova, a would-be writer, sourly informs her father that the Gulag survivors all swarm to Moscow “like bees to honey.” 47 Unlike the British convicts shipped off to the American Georgia or the British settlers in America, the Russians have not developed loyalty to the land in which they settled and where they suffered. That land is viewed only as a satellite of Moscow, and every Russian-speaking person is expected to prioritize accordingly. Cancer Ward is a novel that confirms the presence of the colonial settler in a territory conquered by the force of arms, a novel that attempts to tell the world what Uzbekistan is all about: it is about Russia. The novel adds to the body of cultural artifacts on which the Russian presence in Central Asia relied and that enabled the Russians in Uzbekistan to stand proudly, hungry and lice-infested as they were, as the rightful masters of the land. When Kostoglotov asserts with defiance, “I love my country!” we are given to understand that his love embraced the entire Soviet Union, the center (Moscow) as well as the periphery—the center because it is the heart of Russia, and the periphery because it belongs to the center, which in turn radiates its invigorating Russianness to the most remote periphery. Naturally, it does not occur to the humble Sibgatov to claim the land of the Russians by asserting that he loves it. Kostoglotov’s exhortations about the rodina sound hollow when juxtaposed with the essay “If We Dream, Is That Wrong? What Do You Say?” by a contemporary Uzbek writer, Etibar Akhunava: “The creators of the cotton and silk that is being sown and made to grow in our homeland [yurtimiz ] are women.. . . Yet, they do not have pretty scarves or dresses made of those fabrics.” 45 They also ring false next to the poet (Abdu) Razzaq Abdurashidaw’s majestic lament over the destruction of Turkestani culture by the Russians: Registan, O age-old plaza!

How much misery that friendly head of thine saw. Thy colors are stains of woe or sprayed blood. Is thy stone the head of captive beauties?! Forgive me if I lacerate thy heart, If I recall the past, that instant... Really I am thy offspring too, not a stranger, For that reason my compassion is for thee, Registan! 49 The awareness that the entire Russian cast of characters consists of strangers, of usurpers in lands handed to them by a not-so-distant violence, is absent in Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Cancer Ward teems with active, living, talented Russians to whom Turkestani identity remains a closed book. The “natives” are twodimensional, somewhat like that colorless Arab passerby whom Mersault kills on the Algerian beach. Just as the readers of The Stranger gain no insight into the problems of the emerging Algerian nationality, so are the readers of Solzhenitsyn led to think that Russia has established itself naturally and permanently in the Central Asian steppes. In Cancer Ward, the network of echoes and allusions, which John Crowe Ransom has called the “texture” of the literary work, resonates with Russia and not with Tashkent. Cancer Ward is not a novel by a Russian Gertrude Stein or an Ernest Hemingway, its exotic locale serving as a backdrop for a Russian expqtriaje adventure. Not even a Kiplingesque acknowledgement of the reality and separateness of the colony has been attempted. Cancer Ward is a colonialist novel pure and simple, a novel that weakens the identity formation processes in the Central Asian republic. It re-sites Russia in the Asian steppe. Solzhenitsyn was not a naive observer, a mortally sick victim of the Gulag who merely wrote about the types of patients he encountered an the help he received. He was a writer whose rhetoric of concealment suppressed the tragedy of the Uzbeks, which

reached deeper than socialist economics and politics. 50 His novel is steeped in colonialist rhetoric that obscures for the Turkomen the road of free development; it is an attempt to present them as immature human beings, children in need of Russian tutoring, savages who never produced or imagined anything beautiful, anything “that would be distinctly theirs, the product of their nature.” 51 The novel endeavors to finalize Russian appropriation of the geography of Central Asia and to extend it to the realm of identity and culture. More perhaps than any other contemporary Russian novelist, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates how the empire has been part and parcel of the Russian national consciousness, how empire endowed it with self-confidence and pride even in the conditions of humiliation and lack of assertiveness the Gulag times engendered. If this novel had been written in the 1990s instead of the 1960s, would Solzhenitsyn have designated Tashkent as the place of action, thus disregarding native sensibilities? Would he have been able to suppress the Uzbek narrative as thoroughly as he did in 1968? At the end of the twentieth century in the capital of Uzbekistan, a hospital owed by Moscow would be perceived by the local inhabitants as a foreign hospital, one serving the Russian minority, a reminder of the colonial domination or (most unlikely) one established by a Russian charity. By imposing a Russian perspective on the land of the Uzbeks in the 1960s, Solzhenitsyn placed himself in the same imperial camp that houses those English and French writers who presented Africa with paternalistic arrogance. 52 It is remarkable indeed that the major Solzhenitsyn biographers and critics, from Zhores Medvedev to Michael Scammell and from Alexander Yanov to Harriet Murav, have entirely missed the colonialist aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s opus. This perceptional lacuna speaks eloquently of the omnipresence of idees regues not only in Flaubert’s time but also in our own. Interestingly, various editions of Solzhenitsyn’s works contain deletions and additions indicating that with the changing political map of Asia, the writer or his editor deemed it necessary to rephrase certain passages. The first Russian

edition of Cancer Ward, and Rebecca Frank s translation of the novel into English, contain a reference to the USSR as a Russian domain, a reference that was eliminated from the Collected Works in Russian from which this chapter’s quotations have been taken. The sequence “Many of our cemeteries in the Altai ... and Novosibirsk area ... are shamefully neglected. ... Is that a mark of our national character?” can be found in the first edition of Cancer Ward but not in the Collected Works. 53 Perhaps the author deemed it so risky to count the Altai area among Russian lands that he removed the reference to the Russian national character altogether. In a 1995 interview, the Russian rear admiral V. I. Aleksin explained “what kind of navy Russia would need” in the 1990s and beyond. 54 According to Aleksin, Russia needs a Navy that would allow it to control the Arctic, for “whoever rules the Arctic, rules the world.” Furthermore, Russia needs the kind of navy that would allow it to keep the territories of the Russian Federation together. If that goal is not achieved, contended Aleksin, Russia will “reel back to the times before Peter the Great. This is reminiscent of a remark uttered by Frangois Mitterand in 1957: “Without Africa, there will be no French history in the twenty-first century.” 55 Both Aleksin and Mitterand referred to the fear that colonial powers have that their prestige and success will be cut short by the lib eration of colonies. For all its admirable concern with the evils of communism, Cancer Ward is also an artistic expression of the compulsion to conquer and retain the colonies that has so marred Russian history. While the late President Mitterand traveled a long way after he had made that statement, there is no indication that Solzhenitsyn, let alone Aleksin, have followed suit. NOTES 1. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 175. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rakovyi korpus, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1979). All quotations in the text are from this edition unless otherwise indicated.

3. Abraham Rothberg, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971). 4. Ibid., 184-85. 5. Edward A. Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks: From the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), 200-201; and Seton-Watson, 442 ff. 6. M. Vakhabov, Tashkent v period trekh revoliutsii (Tashkent: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Uzbekskoi SSR, 1957), 8-9; and H. B. Paksoy, “Muslims in the Russian Empire: Response to Conquest,” Studies in Comparative Communism 19, nos. 3-4 (Autumn/Winter 1986). 7. Seton-Watson, 443^4-4; Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1960); and Robert J. Kaiser, “Ethnic Demography and Interstate Relations in Central Asia,” in Roman Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 230-65. 8. Vakhabov, 22. 9. N. S. Gumilev, Sobranie sochineni, edited by G. P. Struve and V. Filippov (Washington, DC: V. Kamkin, 1962-68). 10. E. M. Thompson, “N. S. Gumilev and the Russian Ideology,” Nikola j Gumilev, 1886-1986, edited by Sheelagh Graham (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, J.7U / All 11. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 641. Aleksandr Nevskii is another object of the Russian proclivity to present military men as gentle and saintly. John Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200-1304 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), 101-21.

12. John Garrard, “Corresponding Heroines in Don Juan and Evgenii Onegin, Slavonic and East European Review, 73, no. 3 (1995), 42848. 13. Allworth, 213 f. 14. Ibid., 213. 15. Ibid., 216. 16. Associated Press, 10 October 1995, 17 H B. Paksoy, “Introduction’/-in Central Asia Reader: The Rediscovery of History (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), ix. Similarly, the Republic of Tatarstan adopted the Latin alphabet for the Tatar language at the Second World Congress of Tatars, held in Kazan' in 1997. Rimzil Valiev et al„ “Tatarstan faces challenges, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 31 December 1997. 18. F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnikpisatelia, vol. 3. (Paris: YMCA Press, n. d.), 602. 17. OClUll” VY dloUll, “ ' , _ /» # 4 AQA\ 20. Grigorii Reznichenko et al., “Aral'skaia katastrofa,” Novyi mir, no. 5 (May 1989), 182-241; CIA World Factbook 1993 (Washington, DC, 1994). 21. Vakhabov, 27. 22. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Archie Brown et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 136. 23. Paksoy, Central Asia Reader, ix.

24. Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium, 256-57; in English, Imperium (New York: Knopf, 1993). 25. Kapuscinski, 225. 26. Allworth, 239-10. 27. Said (1994), 179. 28. K. Iashen et al., Istoriia uzbekskoi sovetskoi literatury, 19171985, 5 vols. (Tashkent: Izdatel'stvo Fan, 1987); and A. Kh. Khaitmetov et al., Istoriia uzbekskoi literatury s drevneishikh vremen do Velikoi Oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii, 2 vols. (Tashkent: Izdatel'stvo Fan, 1987). 29. Helene Carrere-d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (1978); in English, translated by M. Sokolinsky and H. A. La Farge (New York: Newsweek Books 1979), 185. 30. Allworth, 230. 31. Ibid., 175. 32. Ibid., 299. 33. Ministerstvo sviazi Respubliki Uzbekistan, Telefonnyi spravochnik dlia delovogo cheloveka (Tashkent: Ministerstvo sviazi, 1992). 34. Mikhail S. Bernstam, “The Demography of Soviet Ethnic Groups in World Per-' spective,” in Robert Conquest, ed. The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 322. 35. “Davai Oleg, o berezovom! chto ty nachal?—prosil Sibgatov. . . . No ty po poriadku, Oleg!. . . Esli s samogo nachala, Sharaf, to vot. Pro doktora Maslennikova tot prezhnii bol'noi rasskazal mne, chto

eto staryi zemskii vrach Aleksandrovskogo uezda, pod Moskvoi.” Rakovyi korpus, Sobranie sochinenii, 139, 140, 141. 36. “Skazhi, kakoe zh u etikh evenkov obmundirovanie?” Ibid., 296. 37. Max Ognev, “Sorry State of Human Rights in Russia,” Agence France-Presse, 30 November 1998; and Paul Goble, “North Caucasus: The Return Of A Dangerous Concept,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 6 November 1998. 38. Badretdinov, 99-100. 39. Said (1978), 94. 40. “Esli ministerstvo ne predusmotrelo—neuzheli ia vam budu na svoi den'gi pokupat'?” Rakovyi korpus, 88. 41. Carrere-d’Encausse, 135. 42. Igor Zotov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Al'ber Kamiu i krizis voobrazheniia,” Ogonek, no. 29 (4408) (July 1995), 66-67. 43. Bernstam 346-49; and Carrere-d’Encausse 86. 44. Rakovyi korpus, 530,531. 45. “U nas ego eshchee he tantsuiut. V Moskve, i to mastera” (Asia, Rakovyi korpus, 128). 46. “Ia - u sebia na rodine, kogo mne stesniat'sia?” Rakovyi korpus, 64. 47. “A oni v Moskvu-to i lezut teper', im tarn kak medom namazano,” Rakovyi korpus, 272. 48. Allworth, 317. 49. Ibid., 318.

50. Solzhenitsyn, Rakovyi korpus, 125-26; and The Cancer Ward, translated by Rebecca Frank (New York: Dell, 1968), 160-61. This passage has been deleted from the YMCA edition of Sobranie sochinenii (1978-79): see 138-39. The passage refers to Russian cemeteries, but it also contains criticism of Russians. 51. Adam Mickiewicz, “Ust$p” (1832). 52. Said (1993), xviii. 53. “U nas pozomo zapushcheny mnogie kladbishcha . . . na Altae . . . i k Novosibirsku ... Chto eto— nash natsional'nyi kharakter?” 54. Vitalii Melik-Karamov, “Kakoi flot nuzhen Rossii?” Ogonek, no. 29 (4408) (July 1995), 36-8. 55. “Sans Afrique, il n’y aura pas l’histoire de France au XXIe siecle.” Franqois Mitterand, Presence frangaise et abandon (1957), quoted in Said, Culture and Imperialism, 178.

5

Imperial Desire in the Late Soviet Period While Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward is a novel that refuses to acknowledge colonial space on the verge of separatism, the texts considered in this chapter demonstrate the imperial desire that embraces spaces where colonial power is still firmly entrenched. In such a situation, three types of imperial pathology can be discerned. The first belittles or minimizes the presence of the native peoples in territories that, as recently as a few generations ago, were inhabited in large part by non-Europeans, who retain residual presence and rights to the land. Such is the situation in Siberia. While a large percentage of Siberia’s natives were destroyed during the Russian march toward the Pacific, Siberia and the Far East are still divided into ethnic republics and areas that nominally, at least, possess sovereignty, based on the rights of the area’s native inhabitants. It can be expected that in the future, the struggle for territory will become acute in the Siberian part of the “Russian” Federation, not necessarily because the native peoples will rise, but because the Russian-speaking white population will switch their attachment from Moscow to their native lands. That brings us to the second kind of imperial pathology. It manifests itself in a refusal by writers to distinguish between the Russian-speaking people in the center of the empire and those on the periphery. Siberia is one such periphery, and its inhabitants show the signs of getting weary of Moscow’s control. In the twenty-first century, they may try to revive such entities as the Dal'nevostochnaia Respublika (1920—22) and other entities meant to assert regional rights. This development would correspond to how in the British empire the “white” colonies eventually became independent states. But some Russian writers studiously avoid noticing the centrifugal forces at work in the alreadydiminished empire, and they continue to proffer a vision of a unified Russian Federation. The third form of imperial pathology is evident in regard to such minorities as Jews and others who have no territorial

claims but whose interests are stubbornly disregarded. In this last case, it is not a question of separatism but rather of recognition of Another s point of view without demonizing or belittling him or her. That visions of Empire survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union is attested by an availability of empire-extolling books in Russian bookstores in the 1990s. In 1992, there appeared in St. Petersburg a book entitled The Russian Empire: Dictionary and Guide [Rossiiskaia imperiia: slovar'-spravochnik ]. Its contents were mostly lifted from the Efron-Brokgauz’ Malyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (1907-09), but in such a way as to offer a resplendent image of what Ryszard Kapuscinski called the Imperium. The book lists in alphabetical order all the guberniias and major cities of the tsarist empire, except Helsinki and Warsaw. Scores of non-Russian territories have been included with no indication of their distinctness, thus contributing to the perception that they have no histories of their own, no separate coherence, and no languages in which to tell their stories, even if they had stories worth telling. In this book they become invisible as separate entities. They are dissolved in the sea of Russian identity as parts of Rossiiskaia imperiia, not unlike England’s colonial territories, which had once been forced to exchange their own identities for that of an appendix to the English people. But while the British empire transformed itself with the changing times, the Imperium, this book suggests, is in existence even today and may be in existence tomorrow, regardless of wishes of the mute peoples it has embraced. It is this imperial wish of the Russian elites, evident even in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period of disorientation and chaos, that I would like to address in this chapter. The writers who serve these wishes write about the Imperium as if it were Russia: they continue to confuse the Imperium with Russia in spite of the fact that some of it has already fallen away and elsew'here cracks have appeared. Like their Western European counterparts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these writers perceive the unassimilated lands of the “Russian” Federation, of the Soviet Union, and of the tsarist empire as forever tied to Moscow, never once entertaining the

idea that such a perspective wipes out the background of the colonial story. This is particularly evident in regard to Siberia, which remains the least known and least explored part of the world. While Siberia is Russian speaking and the percentage of its native population has been reduced to the single digits, its separateness from ethnic Russia has been acknowledged even by the most ardent imperialists, such as Valentin Rasputin. That so few foreigners have ever visited Siberia is due not only to the harshness of its climate but also, and primarily, to the policies of the Russian state, which has jealously guarded Siberia from the foreign gaze ever since Ivan the Terrible’s Cossacks began to make their way through its sparsely populated hills and plains. Before the Russians overpowered Siberia’s population and natural resources, it was a land of mystery, untraveled by explorers because of its size, climate, and remote location. After the Russian conquest, Siberia became a closed land, and information about it became a state secret. The seventeenthcentury Dutch businessman Isaac Massa, who lived in Moscow for several years, wrote that Muscovites were forbidden to discuss with foreigners the lands east of the Urals; a Muscovite who disobeyed that order and disclosed information about Siberia to foreigners was put to death. 1 Under the shroud of secrecy, Siberian furs and minerals were transported to Russia and sold on international markets, while native populations were subjected to various forms of extermination. Victor Mote remarks, “Between 1582 and 1953, the name Siberia was synonymous with the decimation of native populations and their cultures.” 2 During that period, the Russians destroyed at least seventy-five ethnicities and at least as many languages. Siberia became a land of prisons for enemies of the empire, especially those inhabiting its central and western parts. Even in the post-Soviet period, travel to and within Siberia has been difficult, owing to the ingrained habit of secrecy of its administrators and a lack of traveler-friendly infrastructure over its 4.9 million square miles. In the mid-1980s, Siberia accounted for about half of Russia’s exports. 3 Over the centuries, Siberia has sustained the

empire in two ways: as a source of commodities that were sold for foreign currency, and as a dumping ground for the empire’s adversaries and for common criminals. These two groups could be deposited there with total unaccountability, international or domestic. Given its history of concealment, the data about the peoples of Siberia have been scarce. This is also true of the aspect of Siberia that most Westerners know from hearsay: its reputation as a giant prison system. The Russian sources have minimized data about the number of prisoners and their mortality, while at the same time maximizing that on free settlers. It is virtually impossible to find nineteenth-century data on the percentage of prisoners and exiles who died within a few years of arriving there, as opposed to those who survived as settlers or returned to their homelands. Indirect evidence suggests that the death rate among prisoners in Soviet and tsarist times was so high as eventually to wipe out all but a small percentage of them. The free settlers profited from prisoner labor and high prison mortality. Before the Trans-Siberian Railway was built in the second decade of the twentieth century, ordinary prisoners en route to their prisons went to their destinations on foot, which meant that their journeys lasted for months. Having arrived at one of the prison distribution centers, such as Tobolsk in western Siberia, they were further dispatched either on foot or, if the transport took place in summer or early fall, by barges. Political prisoners too traveled to Siberia on foot and in chains, dropping dead on the way in considerable numbers. Full access to penal system data has never been given to foreign scholars; thus Russian statistics on the Siberian population are yet to be verified by independent research. On the other hand, the nationalities and groups that were among the frequent targets of deportation have their own stories to tell, and these stories minimize the number of free settlers and maximize the number of prisoners of conscience. Of all th^ sites to which prisoners were deported in the history of the world, Siberia swallowed up by far the largest number. Juliusz Slowacki’s prose poem Anhelli (1837) tells the story of a symbolic victim of these killing fields. Anhelli speaks for the casualties of Russian expansion into Siberia, victims

whose fate was to pave the way for the empire and perish in the wilderness. George Kennan Sr. noted the following in 1891. Somewhere in the neighborhood [of the mine in Akatui] lie buried many of the Polish patriots sent to Akatui after the insurrection of 1863. I was unable however, to find their graves. The Russian Government does not take pains to perpetuate the memory of the political offenders whom it tortures to death in its Siberian prisons, and over the moldering bodies of most of them there is not so much as a mound. 4 VALENTIN RASPUTIN: CROWDING OUT PERIPHERAL VOICES In Soviet Russia, Siberian writers who reinforced the imperial viewpoint concerning their region were generally favored with large print runs of their works, just as the native voices were being crowded out and memory of the Siberian killing fields all but excised from Russian culture. Foremost among the beneficiaries of this treatment was Valentin Rasputin. His powerful invocations of rodina in the depth of Siberia ring hollow for a reader attuned to the emerging self-consciousness of postcolonial areas of the world, but they have been favorably received by a large segment of the Russian reading public, and they have been rewarded by the state. Rasputin’s status in Russian literature can be compared to that of his contemporary Il'ia Glazunov, a painter who has mastered the pictorial strategies by means of which Russia’s artistic imagination continues to appropriate history and geography of the empire. 5 One device that facilitates this kind of imperial appropriation is the type of narrator Rasputin employs. He is well familiar to the readers of Russian literature, having made his appearance in Gogol'’s and Leskov’s stories. The skaz narrator is simple-minded (though not without cunning), poor, uneducated, and funny. 6 He is certainly not military; he in no way resembles the V-Day troops marching in Red Square as late as May 1995. If he ever attended one of the numerous Russian military schools, he has forgotten about it. One

cannot expect this kind of narrator to show an awareness of what being a military superpower and a territorial glutton means. Rasputin’s and Viktor Astafev’s skaz narrators screen readers from Russia’s territorial and military dilemmas. The rural metaphors they employ deflect readers’ attention from Russia as an imperial bully to the self-image Russians so cherish, Russia as a meek victim. Like a Russian Rip Van Winkle, such a narrator bypasses situations that are beyond his ability to describe and interpret. But unlike Rip, he manages to persuade Russian and foreign readers that he represents the Russian cultural identity, rather than covering up with his village voice the imperial establishment. Rasputin is the author of Siberia, Siberia . . . [Sibir', Sibir'. . . ] (1989), a nonfictional narrative written in the manner of skaz and purporting to employ the point of view of a native Siberian. The book is a mix of popular history, travelogue, a nature-lover s description of landscapes, and environmentalist complaint (Rasputin has tried to slow down the pollution of Lake Baikal by Soviet industries). At his best, Rasputin conveys that fierce sympathy for the land that many visitors to and inhabitants of Siberia have experienced. Siberia is an intoxicating land, its vastness is overwhelming, the richness of its landscape is inebriating—if it is traversed not in chains but in the comfort of a first-class carriage of the Trans-Siberian Railway, or as a backpacker carrying state-of-the-art supplies. The American admirers of Rasputin’s work have rightly noted his sympathy for the land. What passes unnoticed is the epistemological folly of his narrative manner and the all-too-visible insistence that Siberia is a part of ethnic Russia. It is that old mix of Russian philosophizing and didacticism, history and propaganda, lamentation of Russian suffering and blindness to the suffering of Others. The sections of Rasputin’s book that describe native inhabitants of the Baikal region are few and far between. Native sensibilites are dubbed “unreal” by the narrator. For instance, a sense of unreality overwhelms the speaker when he hears the Buriats sing; he is so firmly ensconced in the Russian ownership of Siberia that any challenge to it, even in song, appears illusory to him. The Buriat

customs, such as cremation of the dead, are described with a patronizing curiosity reminiscent of Orientalist descriptions of the quaint and primitive habits of Asians and Africans. The idea that Buriats rather than Russians are the primeval owners of the vast stretches of nearly uninhabited land near Lake Baikal (including the land’s mineral resources) has obviously never crossed the narrator’s mind, even as a point of contention. As an empire’s representative, Rasputin welcomes additions to Siberia’s wealth. In Live and Remember [Zhivi i pomni ] (1975), there is a reference to that famous occupation of Russian soldiers in Europe, looting. We learn that one of the peasants of the Atamanovka kolkhoz, drafted into the Red Army during World War II, regularly sent his wife Vasilisa large packages from the front. Inasmuch as the Soviet soldiers’ salary was minimal, we can only assume that these were the spoils of war, like those that some thrifty soldiers dispatched home. Vasilisa received five such parcels between January and March 1945, and, we are told, she kept mum about her acquisitions. 7 The parcels must have traveled for months from Central Europe to Siberia. They must have been mailed in the summer or fall of 1944, when the Red Army was crossing Poland (the Soviets crossed the Bug River on 21 July 1944 and occupied Warsaw on 17 January 1945). Rasputin does not reveal the content of the parcels; instead, he tells us that Vasilisa used them in lieu of stools ( taburetki ), apparently waiting for her husband’s arrival home to make the final disposition of the goods. The “journey in” of goods acquired in the colonies made for a comfortable and civilized living in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, argues Edward Said; he adds that mature empires were not bent on looting as such but instead developed a system, an organization within the colonies, whereby markets, monopolies, and price competition created indirect ways of profiting from outside possessions. But the Russian empire in both its Soviet and tsarist versions seldom reached that stage. The transport of treasures from the occupied lands to the Russian center was a time-honored mqans of establishing relationships with the conquered. Mere looting, of

course, seldom brings lasting wealth, and the miserable peasants from Atamanovka did not profit much from it. But the places from which the bounty was taken suffered the disruption that such action causes. Not untypically, Rasputin remains blind to such imperial intervention. Rasputin’s rendition of the colonization of Siberia differs substantially from recent scholarly accounts. He says that the Russian farmers who settled there soon began to produce more wheat than they could consume. No figures or dates are supplied, but then, Rasputin’s skaz narrator does not bother with such En lightenment-induced details. Siberia did indeed become a major producer of wheat and butter for tsarist Russia, shortly before the October Revolution; however, for a much longer period its primary resources for the empire were furs, precious metals, oil, and gas. Between 1830 and 1850, the production of Siberian gold increased 250-fold. As early as the seventeenth century, one-tenth of the Russian state income came from furs obtained in Greater Siberia (including western and eastern Siberia and the Far East). 8 At the end of the twentiethcentury, Russia survives largely on Siberian gas, oil, and minerals, not Siberian wheat. Such key details go unmentioned in Rasputin’s narrative. He mentions greed and depletion, robbery and brutality, and—this one marginally—the death of “small nations,” but in the absence of specific names and policies, such selfrighteous brooding too easily substitutes for historical data or realistic proposals to make amends to those hurt by Moscow’s voraciousness. Rasputin bemoans the fact that the exploitation of Siberia was not always carried out in an optimal fashion, one that would enable it to remain Russia’s larder more effectively and for a longer period of time. His remarks about colonization imply that Siberia had no native populations to speak of, that the Russians entered an empty land, as it were. While he occasionally mentions the Buriats, the Tungus (the Evenks), and others, these mentions are few and far between, whereas the vision of an uninhabited taiga which the heroic Russians, a la Dr. Livingstone, have criscrossed, looms large.

Rasputin is largely silent about those who left their bones in Siberia, sometimes leaving descendants but mostly not: the prisoners and forced laborers whom the Russian state dumped in the wilderness, ordering them to civilize it and extract from it profits for the empire. He makes some perfunctory remarks about them but studiously avoids names, figures, dates, histories. His rendition of the Siberian prison system stresses the “trespass” (provinnost') of prisoners rather than the political aspect of their sojourn. According to the Russian data, the majority of prisoners in tsarist Siberia were common criminals, but Rasputin does not mention that labor camps made no distinction between political prisoners and common criminals. 9 He speaks a great deal of the Decembrists, of whom only a few hundred went to Siberia, but he has only one-liners regarding the tens of thousands of Polish insurrectionists” of 1831, 1863 and earlier uprisings who ended their lives there, never having been pardoned for their political trespasses. 10 The massive deportations to Siberia and Kazakhstan of the citizens of Central and Eastern Europe occupied by Soviet forces in 1939^fl go unmentioned, yet they were six or seven thousand times more numerous than the deported Decembrists. The deportations from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia that took place at that time destroyed some 20 percent of these small nations’ citizens. In Rasputin’s narrative about the prison system, the erasure of nonRussian history is overwhelming. What is one to make of the following statement. “The city of Tobol'sk (even if he never visited it) is as dear to a Siberian as Moscow is to a rossiianin [a nonRussian inhabitant of the Russian Federation], or Kiev is to a Slav.” 11 The Czechs might be surprised to learn that Kiev is supposed to evoke in them inchoate stirrings, while Dagestanis or Tatars are likely to react with anger to a suggestion that Moscow is the center of their longings. Since Rasputin finds his readers primarily in Russia and in the Englishspeaking countries, such inanities pass unnoticed, and they congeal into “truth” that eventually consigns to oblivion the non-Russian voices of the empire. Or consider this: several foreigners walk with

Rasputin in the vicinity of Lake Baikal, and are duly impressed. One of them, a Swedish saxofonist named Paul Winkler, plays “A Song of Protest,” which he had previously played in the Grand Canyon in Arizona, protesting the pollution of Indian reservations by uranium mines. Rasputin’s pedagogy creates a parallelism between America and Russia, polluters both. Thus the presence of Others is elbowed out in Rasputin’s book, the empire’s exploitation of Siberia is minimized, and parallels are created with another nation’s misbehavior of a different degree and at a different time. Describing Irkutsk architecture in great detail, Rasputin fails to mention a Catholic church built there by political prisoners in the nineteenth century. This church was a prominent sight in the center of that city’s historical district in the mid-1980s, when Rasputin’s text was written. It is the only example in Irkutsk of neoGothic architecture and more generally of nineteenth-century masonry. The surviving nineteenth-century structures are otherwise made of wood, for instance one of the Decembrist homesteads, which is also in the city’s old district and which Rasputin duly mentions. During my visit to Irkutsk in 1985, the church was being used as a warehouse; its sturdy walls defied the misuse, however, and were it not for the boarded-up front door, one might have taken this structure for a functioning church. Nor does Rasputin mention the Catholic churches in Tobolsk and elsewhere in Siberia, the churches that testify to considerable presence of non-Russian Europeans in Siberia. 12 In combination with a paternalistic attitude toward native Siberians, such lacunae make for a very selective history of the region, in line with the imperial obliviousness of which Rasputin is perhaps the most vivid example among Russian writers of the late twentieth century. He is a herald of the version of Russian history that corresponds to the history of the Orient as supplied by the Orientalists. The closest Rasputin comes to accounting for the tsarist katorga (forced labor camps) and the Soviet Gulag occurs when he compares the newcomers to a tide: they came, and after a certain number of years they quietly disappeared, as if sinking into the ground. Again the tide comes and again new thousands come. Such generalities reinforce the notion of noninvolvement of ordinary

Russians in the policies of the empire, and they delay the selfexamination that Russian intellectuals need to undertake. Rasputin’s book is not, as some reviewers have said, a defense of Siberia against Russian and Soviet rapaciodsness but rather a defense of Russian presence in Siberia. 14 Rasputin bemoans the damage that the Soviet Russian management inflicted upon Lake Baikal, but he does so from the point of view of a Russian grieving a diminution of Moscow’s natural resources. He speaks the language of Siberian nationalism in the sense in which British colonialists, enamoured of a foreign land in which they had settled or had been bom, spoke for the interests of that land as part of the British Empire. Rasputin tells the story of a Siberian governor under Peter the Great, a certain Count Gagarin; Peter had him hanged, ordering that the body remain hanging until the rope rotted. The reason? It was rumored that Gagarin had favored Siberian separatism. This is the only tale of extraordinary cruelty told by Rasputin about that land overflowing with cruelty, and one wonders whether he did not tell it to discourage this most heinous of imaginable crimes against the Russian state. Rasputin’s Siberia provides an appropriately nuanced chronology of Russian imperial history. The Cossacks who conquered western Siberia for Ivan the Terrible loom large, as do the Russian peasants who were pressured to resettle there as early as the eighteenth century. Siberia is a paean honoring Ermak [Yermak] and other Russian “tamers of strange lands,” to quote Nikolai Gumilev. Singing songs of praise in their honor, Rasputin makes Ermak a martyr for the Russian cause, somewhat as did Gumilev, who presented angelic portraits of the Russian generals who had conquered Turkestan. Rasputin leaves no doubt that the conquerors of Siberia were heroes: they were, after all, exposed to the “arrows with black feathers” of the natives and had to engage in hand-to-hand combat with them. 15 His rendition of Ermak’s expedition to western Siberia has it that “there were only five hundred Cossacks, whereas the

enemy (vrag) was counted in the thousands and would have won, if the Russian braves were not led by Ermak, a man of outstanding military and administrative talents.” 16 A Western scholar provides a somewhat different version of events: “In 1581 or 1582, Yermak’s band, now swollen to 1,650 well-armed Cossacks, descended into the Tura River country to confront the enemy. Equipped with muskets and armor, they easily outgunned a ragtag army of Tatars, Ostyaks, and Voguls armed with swords, lances, and bows and arrows.” 17 Rasputin’s narrator is a simple man, and thus taking issue with this or that inaccuracy seems pedantic: the skaz narrators are meant to be inaccurate. An accumulation of such little untruths, however, produces a vast shift in perspective. Rasputin admits that Russian successes in conquering Siberia were due to Russian amour-propre ( samoliubie ), but he does so not in order to censure it (moralist that he is) but to applaud it. 18 The Russians are a great nation, and their samoliubie was fortunate for Siberia, he suggests. Without it, Siberia would not have partaken of the wonderful Russian communality that characterizes the lands in which Russians have settled. He expresses a wish that the town of Velikii Ustiug be honored in the annals of Russian history, because it was home to a particularly large number of Cossacks. Ermak, Erofei Khabarov, Vasilii Poiarkov, and others should likewise be honored, he suggests. He says nothing about the brutalities these and other Cossacks committed in their difficult trek through Siberia. Khabarov’s and Poiarkov’s dealings survived in native memory for two hundred years on account of their singular cruelty. They first tortured the parents before the eyes of their children and then subjected the children to the same death-inducing torture. That such conquerors should be honored as heroes is another inconsistency of Rasputin the moralist. He speaks of Atlasov, “the man who subjugated Kamchatka” ipokoritel' Kamchatki ) with the same pride with which Pushkin spoke of General Ermolov, the man who subjugated the Caucasus. Rasputin compares the English colonization of America with the Russian colonization of Siberia, alleging that unlike the English, the

Russians did not enslave the native populations. There were attempts to enslave the Siberians, admits Rasputin, but they were instantly condemned by the government and by the Russian population itself. One is left with the impression that public opinion played a huge role in Russian history; in disputes between the natives and the Russian settlers, the Russian government is said to have taken the side of the former. 19 In spite of the sometimes brutal treatment of natives by the local Russian administrators, the Russian peasants, having settled on the new land acquired by military force, easily established friendly relations with Buriats and Tungus. 20 Rasputin reiterates that the colonization of Siberia was voluntary and free, that native inhabitants welcomed the newcomers. However, it was tsarist policy to induce the peasants to move to Siberia in order to Russify the region. The inducements included emancipation from serfdom and the waiving of taxes. The Russian serfs were thus favored by the government at the expense of native inhabitants. In this situation, it is hardly likely that the latter welcomed the former with open arms. Rasputin hammers home the point that Siberia has become an important part of Russia and that thus the problem of separation is moot. He states that “Siberia is more Russian than Russia itself. . . . Siberia and Russia are one. . . . Siberia cannot exist without Russia.” Siberia “was destined to become part of the body and blood of Russia.” 21 In Rasputin’s fiction, the methods of appropriation change, but the ideology remains the same. In “You Live and Love” [“Vek zhivi —vek liubi”] (1981), fifteen-year-old Sania, a Russian, sees Siberia in terms of Nikolai Gogof’s Evenings on a farmstead near Dikanka [Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki] (1832). The somber atmosphere of Siberian nights is rendered in Gogolian terms or reinterpreted through another variety of colonial terminology (for Gogol' too wrote of Ukraine rather than Russia). The works of Gogol' act as a solvent in which the cultural boundaries between Russia and Siberia vanish, thus preempting native self-definition. This story does not contain a

description of Siberia but rather an ascription of Russianness to Siberia. Nowhere in Siberia is there an indication that the living standards of nonRussians in Siberia have been dramatically different from those of the Russians. In 1989, only 3 percent of native dwellings had gas, 0.4 percent had water, and 0.1 percent had central heat. Most had no sewage disposal, and their size was half of that of Russian dwellings. The native villages were often destroyed by fiat of the Moscow government, and the natives were forced to move to larger settlements, which made it difficult of impossible for them to provide for themselves. 22 Pollution and financial troubles affected primarily the native peoples. As Russians tried to extract the maximum amount of oil, gas, timber, and furs, from tundra and taiga, the interests of native peoples came dead last. In the 1990s, the native inhabitants of Siberia tried to reassert their right to the land by staging demonstrations and electing representatives. Their voices were drowned in the cacophony of competing interests in Moscow. These developments surfaced in postcommunism, but they were just beneath the surface in the mid 138 Imperial Knowledge 1980s; as a writer attuned to the land, Rasputin must have been aware of them. But there is no trace of native-oriented advocacy in his books. Nor does Rasputin mention the issue of property rights: he takes it for granted that the wealth of Siberia belongs to the Russians, whether they be Nemtsov and Chubais in Moscow or people like himself in Irkutsk. Yet as Victor Mote points out, if the wealth of the native peoples belonged to them, the richest province of the “Russian” Federation would be Khantia-Mansia in western Siberia; each member of these two small nations would have been a millionaire many times over. 23 Rasputin does distinguish between Russians who treated Siberia as a way station and those who decided to make it their home;

however, he also insists that both groups acknowledge the primacy of Moscow as the center of the empire and that they harbor no separatist dreams. In his view, the problems of Siberia can be solved by a dialogue between these two groups. It does not occur to Rasputin (even as a point to debate and dismiss) that the administration that Moscow imposed upon Siberia has been disastrous for that land and that native Siberians such as himself, in alliance with the non-Russian population, might want to say no to Moscow and ask for a genuinely federal status. This inability to put the good of the people above the good of the Russian imperial state is characteristic of Russian nationalism, and it is also its Achilles’ heel. For Rasputin, if there is a guilty party, it is modernization. “When the tsars were here, Siberian wilderness was in less danger,” he maintains. 24 Perhaps the fact that Rasputin subsequently joined the most reactionary current in Russian society, supporting the antiYeltsin coup in 1993 and making anti-Semitic statements in 1998, is not unrelated to the point of view he adopts in his Siberian-based panegyric to Russian colonialism. ANATOLII RYBAKOV: MANAGING COLONIAL SPACE Rasputin is not the only writer of the late Soviet period to engage in perception management in regard to Siberia. In the writings of Anatolii Rybakov and Viktor Astafev, Siberia also changes into Russia, and its history and peoples disappear. In Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat [Deti Arbata] (1988) and in Astafev’s short stories, Siberia becomes a white colony, comparable to Britain’s America or Australia, where native populations were likewise excised from some writers’ works. (However, to mention only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or James Fenimore Cooper, they loomed large in other writers’ works —no parallel can be found in Russia.) Since the nineteenth century, Russian literature has had a tradition of presenting Siberia as a place to which Russians could emigrate if it became hard to make a living in the fatherland. In Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov, Mrs. Khokhlakova’s advice to Dmitrii Karamazov is to seek his fortune in the goldprospecting region of

Yakutia. When Dmitrii desperately searches for money to repay a debt to his former fiancee, Mrs. Khokhlakova, that spokeswoman for Russian public opinion of the 1870s, advises him to do what impecunious Russians of her time could do as a measure of last resort: go to the colonies. What a parallel between that and Mr. Micawber, seeking to improve his fortunes in Australia. The details of how the Russians compelled the Yakuts to reveal to them the location of gold-bearing territories, indeed the very fact that such compulsion was central to the history of the Yakut gold, are blotted out from Dostoevskii’s novel and from Russian memory. The Brothers Karamazov creates an impression that the Russians themselves discovered the gold-bearing territories in Yakutia-Sakha and Kolyma, while the Yakuts did not even know what they possessed. 25 In Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat Siberia likewise becomes an extension of the Russian landscape and mores, as if Russian geography and countryside could be moved eastward at will. Siberia’s non-Russian peoples are belittled by such representations. If they appear at all in Rybakov’s novel, they are on the verge of Russification, standing at the door of the Imperial House that is the writer’s (and the presumed reader’s) center of attention. The peoples of the Enisei [Yenisei] River region are marginalized in ways that suggest that the very geography of the place works against their importance. Sasha Pankratov’s Siberian exile becomes an extension of his Moscow life, a brutal and challenging version of it to be sure, but an extension nevertheless. Rybakov’s Siberia is peopled by persons like himself, Russians from the “mainland,” whose cultural center is Moscow, and who assume that everyone else in the narrative trajectory feels likewise. Seeing events and happenings through Muscovite eyes only, they deign to notice the natives only indirectly, by using geographical terms that go back to preRussian times: Podkamennaia Tunguska, Evenkiiskii natsionalnyi okrug, Taishet.

Sasha Pankratov and his Moscow colleagues are exiled to an area east of the Enisei River. The area is inhabited by the Evenki, or Tungus, who numbered between ten and fifteen thousand in the 1930s, when the action of the novel unfolds. 26 The area was similarly scarcely populated by Russians except for the concentration camps, and thus its native inhabitants should have figured prominently in Sasha’s extensive travels through the region. Not only do they not, but their very identity is confused with that of the Tatars. 27 Zida, Sasha s casual lover, is lumped together with the “natives” (as opposed to Russians) by the narrator, who in this respect is Sasha’s alter ego. As was the case with Solzhenitsyn’s Tashkent, the native voices do not even whisper; they are consigned to total silence. The treatment of Zida is symptomatic of Rybakov’s colonial attitude. While he lacks Joseph Conrad’s depth and frustrated sympathy for the local inhabitants, he displays in abundance the impenetrability to local history and society that characterizes colonialist writers. Zida is introduced to the reader by means of her first name and patronymic, as if she were Russian. Her father s name is distorted into a form that sounds alien and ridiculous to Russian ears: a putdown against which the Turkic and Ugro-Finnic peoples of Siberia have had no recourse. An offshoot of this are the Chukchi jokes, which avail themselves of the fact that the name of this remote tribe sounds funny to Russian ears. The feminization of the conquered geographies, so prominent in Lermontov ’ s Hero of Our Time, is evident in Rybakov’s narrative as well. The land is there for the Russians to travel in, hunt in, or dig into. The native women are led into erotic relationships with the Russians, while the conquered men are absent and thus symbolically deprived of their masculinity. A female teacher, Zida, is the only representative of the natives to acquire an extended presence in Rybakov’s book. She is Sasha’s lover, helper, and entertainer, but she has no voice and no aspirations of her own (except to netting Sasha). She appears from nowhere and

disappears into nowhere; it is suggested that people like her have no narratives of their own: they are just props in stories about Russians. Zida emerges through the narrator’s, and Sasha’s, Russian voice. She falls madly in love with Sasha, like a Madame Butterfly of Siberia, but unlike her Japanese counterpart she does not even complain when Sasha leaves her. She is entirely disposable, like a dog who does not dare to whine when her master punishes her. “She was gone for good, vanished from his life as mysteriously as she had entered it,” says the narrator. 28 She risks her own life and freedom many times to save Sasha, and she conceives of a way to wipe out his “criminal” record by offering to marry him and let him assume her name. This devotion Sasha Pankratov compares to the actions of a cockroach. The final irony about Zida comes in the narrator’s disclosure of the way she makes a living. She is a teacher of Russian. The intellectual energies of this representative of the conquered peoples are harnessed to advance the presence of the conquerors, just as her sexual and moral energies are employed to bolster Sasha’s wellbeing. All this bias is taken in his stride by Rybakov’s narrator and,* one suspects, by the author as well, just as it has been by other Russian writers who have woven Siberia into their narratives. Here and elsewhere, Siberia serves as a backdrop for stories that might as well have been told in Moscow, for it is Moscow’s voice that resounds in them, not the voice of the region. Other mentions of the Tungus and Evenki people in Rybakov’s novel suggest that they are savages and live off the land, that they are fat and uneducated drunkards, crazy, and riddled with incurable diseases stemming from a lack of hygiene. 29 An old native woman suggests to Sasha that she can put a native girl at his disposal for the price of a scarf. 30 Sasha’s companion Boris uses the contemptuous word “savage” ( dikarka ) to describe the girl. 31 While Sasha and his fellow Russians rob native forests by indiscriminate hunting, the “natives” are consigned to repulsiveness, marginality, and prostitution. As was the case with Lermontov’s “evil Chechens,” Rybakov’s natives are defenseless and voiceless. Any ascription can

be attached to them. They are seen through the eyes of their adversaries. General Aleksei Ermolov once said that the Chechens could not be pacified but only exterminated; Rybakov implies that as a culture, the natives of Siberia deserve little better. They have to move over to make room for the Imperium, and they should feel grateful for an opportunity to become Russified. The riches of Siberia are Russian and not Tungus; they are to be used by Moscow rather than sold by the native peoples to the highest bidder. The strategy of power and violence undergirds the plot of Rybakov 4 s novel. The bounty of Siberia may be renewable, as in Valentin Rasputin’s “You Live and Love,” where three Russian colonists compete with the wildlife for food, or it may not, as in the mines of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Rasputin’s narrator says that if the Russians did not collect berries, a forest animal might, and then of what use would the berries be? Nature in the colonies is treated as property of the colonizers. Rybakov mentions a Russian trapper who in a good year would trap or shoot as many as twenty thousand animals; one wonders whether this still falls into the category of renewable resources. In Siberia, Rasputin tells the story of a Russian settlement in Yakutia where meat was not purchased in stores but rather hunted down whenever deemed necessary by the inhabitants. “When the settlers needed meat, they would mount their motorcycles (each had two or three of them), take a brief ride to the tundra, and look for a deer through their field glasses.” 32 This does not seem to bother Rasputin, who elsewhere bemoans the destruction of native habitat near Lake Baikal. Sources indicate that by the eighteenth century, the Russian hunters had already seriously depleted western and eastern Siberia’s stock of fur-bearing animals. By 1700, three-fourths of Greater Siberia’s fur resources were gone. 33 The persistence with which the Russians have exploited Siberia indicates that perhaps Russia’s rulers have taken into account the possibility that eventually these lands would cease to be dependent on Moscow: one should therefore extract from them as much as possible before it is too late. In The Gulag

Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn mentions prisoners who mine precious metals for the Imperium somewhere on its northeastern outskirts. Characteristically, the realization that he was speaking of double exploitation did not enter Solzhenitsyn’s mind at all. He remained indifferent to the fact that these riches were being mined in colonial lands. He would have been satisfied, it seems, if the Russian state brought “free” peasants from the mainland to work in Siberia’s mines, as it resettled entire Cossack villages in the Caucasus to make trouble for the natives in the nineteenth century. Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisoviches were exiled to the colonies. As Said points out, for all their amiability and helplessness, the English expatriates in Australia were also imperialists, and their imperial advantage consisted in the possibility of emigrating overseas and settling there, an opportunity that the colonized peoples did not have. When they began to demand such equal opportunity and chose the British Isles to settle, they were greeted with chagrin, anguish, and dislike at best, and with violence and discriminatory laws at worst. At one point in Rybakov’s novel, a sarcastic remark is uttered that a certain ranking member of the secret police has an Eskimo face. While it is comforting to know that not only Jews can be blamed for Russia’s misfortunes, it is disturbing to find in Rybakov, a writer of Jewish background, a replay of the convenient suggestion that the Russian secret police was run by non-Russians, as if such a thing were possible in a sovereign country. On the other hand, the absence of Eskimo faces on the Arbat is taken for granted, affirmative action not being part of the Russian or Soviet traditions. Texts such as those discussed'above reinforce the imperial posture and continue to assume the centrality of the imperial vision. One can repeat after Said that in Russian writings of the late twentieth century, Russian culture continues to be exonerated of any entanglements with power. Rybakov maintains the pretense that Sasha’s coming from the center of empire did not empower him in Siberia, that he and Zida could have swapped places in society, that

the Buriats were not being crowded out by the arrival of families like the Gus’kovs in Ras putin’s Live and Remember. Yet on the Arbat Zida would be one of those Eskimo or Caucasus faces so suspiciously viewed by the Muscovites in the 1990s, while Sasha in Siberia is in no danger from the natives. This is the core of the colonialist attitude that these ostensibly benign writers display. The voice of the narrator does not allow for any polyphony, any realization that Moscow’s power had been erected on the powerlessness of the local inhabitants. While one would not expect sensitivity to these problems among politicians, an artist’s ability and willingness to engage in ambiguities seems woefully compromised here. The Russian writers’ unilinear vision in matters pertaining to the empire distinguishes them from other imperial writers of the European continent. Soviet statistics for the year 1979 say that there were 353,000 Buriats in the Baikal area, where the action of most of Rasputin’s novels and stories takes place. Like so many other nations and tribes that have been victims of empires, the Buriats were partitioned between the Soviet Union (now the “Russian” Federation) and Mongolia. It is reasonable to expect that the Buriats, many of whom were ousted by Russian settlers, might have some grievances against the newcomers and that writers dealing with Siberia would face up to this emotional issue. Not Rasputin. Unlike the Americans, who have undertaken a tortuous soul-searching in regard to the American Indians, Rasputin and other Russian Siberian writers refuse to recognize the problem, let alone deal with it. * Rasputin’s story Live and Remember speaks of an army deserter who manages to get back to his native Siberian village to which he cannot return legally; so he hides in an old bathhouse and communicates secretly with his wife, who gets pregnant in the process and eventually perishes in the hunt for the deserter that ensues. One might expect that if a writer were to make a patriotic appeal to the reader on the basis of this tragic story, he would call for abolishment of the system that institutionalized the victimization of

persons like Nastena and her husband Andrei for the sake of the power of the state. But instead, Rasputin exhorts his readers to “live,” to preserve Russia biologically, and to “remember,” to preserve tribal memory. If we were dealing here with Estonians or Latvians, whose biological survival is at stake, we could understand this tribal anxiety. But the title refers to Russians, who are certainly not threatened with extinction. For a Russian to make this kind of appeal suggests the author’s desire that Russians survive in Siberia at any price. Rasputin urges his readers not to rebel and not to fight for a dignified life, but to remain alive and preserve the tribe. The above interpretation of Rasputin is not a product of an imagination of a Western scholar. It has been suggested by another Siberian Russian writer, Viktor Astafev, who has commented on Rasputin’s novel thus: “Live and remember, O man: in misery and turmoil, during the harshest trials your obligation is to remain part of your nation. Any kind of separation from your nation, caused either by weakness or by a misunderstanding, imposes new burdens on your rodina and therefore on you.” 34 This is a far cry indeed from Tolstoi’s “living for God and for one’s soul.” Another instance of this sentimental imperialism is Rasputin’s story “The Fire” [’’Pozhar”] (1985). The story deals with a group of downtrodden peasants whose ancestors had been told to leave the Russian mainland and settle in Sibe ria. We are not informed whether the resettlement took place in Soviet times or earlier; the vagueness of peasant history goes hand in hand with Rasputin’s emotional attachment to Russian Siberia. Among the descendants of those settlers is a peasant named Afanasii Bronnikov (Afonia), a righteous man by the narrator’s lights. He and the hero of the story, Ivan Petrovich, live in a settlement called Sosnovka, where the law of the jungle prevails and where people are robbed, beaten, and abused, while the Soviet Russian authorities stand by. Passivity is the principal commandment in that unholy place. Both Afonia and Ivan once lived in the village of Egorovka, which the authorities decided to flood in order to create a

water reservoir. The two men took their resettlement passively, but they remained emotionally attached to the sunken village. Toward the end of the story, Afonia declares that Egorovka had worked “for Mother Russia” and that he would like to commemorate that fact. 35 Two things are worth noting here: first, the collective and nonanthropocentric nature of this Egorovka—we are talking here not about people, not about Ivan and Masha and their families, but about “the village of Egorovka,” a collective entity of forty households, an element of communal organization. The attachment is not to a family home but to a communal entity. Second, this impersonal settlement is said to have worked for the state —not for themselves and not for the sake of a moral ideal, such as God’s commandment or dedication to the good of other human beings. Asked what the community should do after the fire, Afonia answers, “We shall live” ( Zhit ' budeni). In the context of the story, this determination to live is, again, advocated not for the sake of individuals or for the nurturing of families, certainly not for God or one s soul but for the entity called Russia. If Afonia had said, “I worked so that others after me could have a better life,” one might perceive him as a generous and unselfish person. If he had said “I worked for my family,” or “I worked for myself,” we could understand that. If he declared his willingness to live for his soul, we would class him with the spiritually alive peasants of Tolstoi. But working for Russia, a powerful state, one not threatened with disappearance, like some of the conquered ones? The treatment of Russians on the periphery as pegs in the national machine is evident in this and other works, and Rasputin’s consent to this treatment is striking. Great Britain managed to maintain a distinction between domestic liberty and repression and terror abroad; the Russian empire, in contrast, did not offer its titular nationality freedom from suppression by the state. 36 Not for Rasputin such slogans as “better to die standing than live on one’s knees.” In his tales, the state and the land are put before the individual. I see in writers like Rasputin and Astafev a regressive quality, a confirmation of Russia s imperialistic goals achieved at the expense of-ordinary people, rather than the search tor a way out of

the dulling morass'of the collective farm. The inability to distinguish between the interest of the individual and the state, that perennial blind spot of Russian political culture, is amply present in the last “school” to emerge out of socialist realism. At the same time, this passive attitude makes it easy for the state to exploit the peasants. If the people of Sosnovka had rebelled and demanded the right to return to their thinly populated Russian mainland, they would have disabled the colonial drive that makes a Russian state insist on maintaining Russian presence in the expanses of Asia at great cost to ordinary Russians. If they declared that Moscow should not meddle in their business, they would follow in the footsteps of the Americans, who at some point said no to London. But as long as the Russians themselves sacrifice their well-being to the Russian colonial drive, things can hardly get better for them. Writers like Rasputin reinforce the willingness to sacrifice for the rodina rather than a determination to improve the lot of Russian Siberians. Viktor Astafev’s short story “The Fall of a Leaf’ [’’Padenie lista”] (1978) advances Russian imperial claims on Siberia in a more nuanced fashion, but it displays similar shallowness in its search for causes of the Russians’ misery. In the story, a first-person narrator walks through a Siberian campground. He notes that the land bears signs of having been visited by truzheniki, workers, who were not nature lovers. They came to get some rest, and in the process of resting they vandalized the forest. The narrator notes broken tree branches, trampled grass, and tom underbrush. The workers might have come from a settlement like one described in Rasputin’s “Fire”: not cohesive enough to be called a village, just a collection of uprooted people whose afflictions had deprived them of a sense of civic responsibility. The narrator’s attention centers on a tiny birch leaf that is falling down (the Russia-centered symbolism of berezka is prominent). The demise of the leaf initiates a string of accusations that depart spectacularly from the matter at hand. Not only has this forest been

destroyed, intones the narrator, but throughout human history, there have lived thousands and thousands ... of bonebreakers, psychopaths, clever impostors, and all of them stubbornly tried to correct human “faults” starting with the Inquisitor Torquemada, who used an oak stick to break the heads of the stubborn ones, so that they learned to believe in god [lower case], the conquistadors, missionaries, god’s servants [still lower case] and all kinds of do-gooders concerned with “liberty” and “purity” ... all the way to the sick Fiihrer and the velikii kormchii , 37 In a chain of associations characteristic of a mind innocent of the Enlightenment discipline, the vandalism of the Russian visitors to the Siberian forest is laid at the feet of the Spanish Inquisitors. Yet Astafev need not have looked so far away; native brutality was closer at hand, in the very Siberia he was describing. Instead of Torquemada, whose exploits with the oak stick might have arisen in the minds of the party propagandists, Astafev could have mentioned the Cossack conqueror of the Far East after whom the city of Khabarovsk had been named. In one of the many instances, this Cossack seized several hundred native women and children and roasted the children on gridirons formed by the bodies of their parents. 38 By deflecting the guilt of destruction from specific culprits and by failing to ask questions about the state’s responsibility for uprooting large numbers of human beings for the good of the cause, Astafev reinforces the vicious circle of Russian presence in Siberia, wherein the workers lured into the Siberian stroikas by patriotic slogans and large salaries responded with destructiveness to the poor living conditions they encountered. Rasputin’s and Astafev’s characters are gloomier than the typical socialist realist heroes, but otherwise they do not differ significantly from their predecessors. They do not ask questions and do not reflect on events that happened in their own country, let alone in the world. The skaz narrator detaches these Russian settlers from psychological ambiguities and from an awareness of the colonizing

power of the state. The naivete of the narrator prods readers to direct their gaze to the misery, the patriotic dedication, the helplessness of these Russian peasants, rather than to the centerperiphery problem. THE RITUALS OF EMPIRE WORSHIP A 1990 Russian poster shows the Soviet Russian writer, Leonid Leonov, saying, “It is time loudly and reverentially to name that star which shows us the road ahead, the star which will never fade, and which is uniquely capable of inspiring our nation to titanic achievement in uplifting our long-suffering rodina ... All the people have already been repeating this holy and almost-secret name of this star in their minds.. . . That name is Russia.” 39 At this level of mythologization of the rodina, suppression of the individual is bound to occur. The elites of the successful nations managed to temper and qualify such mythologies, and they were guided in this not only by the lessons of history but also by a realization of the philosophical inconsistencies that the mythologies entail. But as argued in chapter 1, Russian culture has persistently underrated systematic philosophy and has never absorbed either European Scholasticism or the Scottish Enlightenment, both of which trained European thinkers in the intricacies of rational thought. Russian cultural and political life is still dominated by an appeal to rodina as the centerpiece of social and philosophical reflection. Raisa Gorbacheva’s speech at Wellesley College on June 1, 1990, provides an insight into an argument one of the best educated and informed women in Russian society made about rodina. It does not differ much from the argument made by the peasants in Rasputin’s stories or by Leonid Leonov in his propaganda statements. In that speech, Ms. Gorbacheva said that love of the motherland ( liubov ' k rodine ) is the most important of all human duties. Given the customary Russian identification of rodina with the political state, Ms. Gorbacheva’s remark can be construed as an expression of that dangerous slogan, “My country right or wrong.” The distinction between nation, state, people, ethnicity, and language disappear in

this-kind of discourse, even though such nuancing might have been expectedTinder the circumstances, the Russian Federation being a multinational state and Ms. Gorbacheva being a political figure. The speech indicated that during the Soviet period, the Russian language remained a victim of the process of ossification regarding issues related to nationalism and national identity. Ms. Gorbacheva was speaking the language of nineteenthcentury Russian mythology, not the language of a modem and developing state. The “default mode” of Russian discourse was prominently demonstrated in her address. Walker Percy once said that language is a living organism, subject to certain organic ailments. It can enter a state of ossification and decrepitude if new concepts are strongly resisted. 41 The Russian language today does not include certain concepts that developed in American English: equal opportunity, minority participation, affirmative action, bilingual education, ideological appropriation, and the like. More importantly, the Russian language remains insensitive to the moral dilemmas arising from dedication to the motherland/fatherland on the one hand, and on the other, from respecting the rights of those who do not share the sentimental attachment to the Russian political mythology but are obliged to live within the boundaries of the “Russian” Federation. How the privileging of rodina becomes encoded in language and literature is a fascinating question that has not been addressed by Russian intellectuals. The vocabulary of the participants in nationhood-oriented discussions in Russia continues to be limited to words and concepts which gained significance in the course of Russia’s successful colonial history. In Russian literary discourse, the issue of civic and political virtues is still reducible to the love of rodina, understood as the imperial state. 42 One recalls here Carl Reim’s chauvinistic invocations concerning nineteenth-century German perceptions of the German state: “Our Fatherland is a holy land, Our ancestors preserved it with their blood. . . . This land, fertilized with the blood of heroes, is a holy heirloom, not one foot 6f

which shall be robbed from us.” 43 These colonialist notions (Germany was then an empire, extending over non-German lands) are strongly imbedded in the Russian discourse as well. A close link between the sense of Russian nationhood and the greed for land obstructs the process of decolonization in the former Russian sphere of influence and within the “Russian” Federation. The colonialist attitudes of Russian writers need to be pointed out, but they do not annul other aspects of Russian literary output. This reservation is particularly important in regard to Solzhenitsyn, whose writings powerfully verbalize a portion of Russian history, while at the same time unwittingly testifying to a special kind of colonialist intervention: making the colonies into a vast archipelago of prisons and death camps, or treating minorities as unworthy of the attention that is bestowed on native Russians. In The Gulag Archipelago and elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn presented the moral pollution of the conquered land, not, however, as one more insult dealt to the periphery by the center but as another injustice meted out to longsuffering Russia. The creation of Siberia’s grisly reputation has been part of the Russian colonial experience. Siberia’s native peoples were subjected to the injustice of having had their homeland besmirched in the memory of the world, not because they were particularly odious but because their conqueror so willed. It has apparently never occurred to Solzhenitsyn that the Russians did to Siberia what the Nazis did to the town of Auschwitz: they wrote its history through violence against the powerless local population. While The Gulag Archipelago remains an important book, it is also a painfully incomplete one. The rodina worship affected not only native peoples but also the Russian mainland’s minorities. This is particularly evident in regard to Jews, scattered throughout the lands of ethnic Russia and in other parts of the empire. The proc ess of imposing interpretations on Jews and on some other minorities was less successful than it was with the Uzbeks or the Caucasus peoples, because the Jews were able to present their own

narrative to the world. But if one were to learn about Russia’s Jews from Russian writers, the picture would be bleak indeed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 14 \Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo\ (1971) adds to the body of writings that darken the picture of this and other minorities in Russian and foreign memory. The heroes of Solzhenitsyn’s programmatic novel are Russians and the great European powers; everyone else is reduced to wickedness or irrelevance. Solzhenitsyn is not the first to write about the empire as if it were Russia, but one would have expected a more refined sensibility from a victim of the empire. Here are some of Solzhenitsyn’s techniques that dress up imperial Russia in the garments of an Eastern Orthodox nation-state and wipe out of existence the aspirations and interests of various national subgroups. August 14 is a tiresome roman-fleuve, but it does have a few gripping scenes, the most remarkable of which has to do with D. G. Bogrov, Petr Stolypin’s assassin. As is often the case, villains are easier to draw than heroes, and Bogrov comes off as a more convincing character than Minister of the Interior Stolypin or other positive heroes of the novel. His anguish before the assassination is suspenseful and engaging, notwithstanding Solzhenitsyn’s obvious dislike for him. Elsewhere, the narrator editorializes by means of adjectives, but that does not detract from the vividness of this character. Bogrov is described as puny, vicious, resentful, shallow, and self-indulgent. He murders Stolypin, we are told, because he has decided that Stolypin was harmful to the Jews. “Hatred was so strong in him he felt he could stab the man with his eyes through the glasses.” 44 Unwittingly perhaps, Solzhenitsyn echoes Lev Tolstoi, who expressed, incomparably more subtly, the feelings of Chechens toward Russians who destroyed their villages and livelihoods. In contrast, in assembling his portrait of Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn avails himself of the authority of an admiring Russian observer. The image of Stolypin in the novel indicates that Solzhenitsyn identified with this man more than with any other figure of recent Russian history. Solzhenitsyn’s deep sympathy for Stolypin manifests itself not only in

a minute recreation of his assassination story and an appropriate shading of his behavior but also, and primarily, in the vocabulary he uses. Adjectives such as bright, shining, and white grace Stolypin’s characterization and echo Russian hagiography, which delighted in such terms. In the assassination scene, Stolypin cuts a fine figure: his intentions are noble, he loves the Russian people, and he works for their good. His final gesture is a blessing upon the ts^r. His summer suit is “dazzling white, he is standing “boldly . . . with his chest out”—a bogatyr' of modem times, a relative of Suvorov and Gumilev’s Turkestani generals, a savior of Russia. No wonder his assassin is “snakelike ... a black presence . . . both suspicious and witty.” We had the evil Chechens, the puny Napoleon, the nasty Poles, and now the snakelike Jew. “The expression on the murderer’s sensitive face had wounded [Stolypin] as much as the bullet,” opines the narrator. Unlike Bogrov, Stolypin does not hate, but he is sensitive, and he suffers when he is not accepted. Alas, 148 Imperial Knowledge says the narrator, the bullet that killed Stolypin also killed the dynasty and Russia itself: it was the first shot of the fusillade at Ekaterinburg. Stolypin indeed seems to have been one of those rare figures in Russian history who resisted the corruption endemic to Russian governments. His civic conscience was high, and his love of Russia seemingly unlimited. Unlike many other contemporary statesmen, Stolypin wanted to improve the fate of the Russian peasants while preserving the power of the state. More generally, he wanted to make the Russian nation into a prosperous people. However, Stolypin’s solicitations concerned only those of Russian nationality, and he took a dim view of the people’s ability to govern itself. Two historians describe the impact of Stolypin on non-Russian minorities and on civil liberties in Russia: Stolypin introduced a new electoral law, enormously restricting the franchise. . . . This action was a clear violation even of the 1906 Fundamental Laws, and Stolypin’s whole action can only be regarded as a coup d’etat.

The Third Duma was thus an unrepresentative assembly, brought into being by a coup d’etat and a falsification of the franchise. 46 In the Third Duma, which opened in November 1907, non-Russian , and lower class representation was cut to a minimum. Entire geographic areas were denied representatives, and only 15% of the population retained voting rights. In the borderlands, the Vilna guberniia was now obliged to elect two Russians; that of Kowno, one. The number of Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian deputies dwindled. While one deputy from European Russia represented 250,000 electors, his counterpart in Congress Poland represented 750,000. . . . The complaints [of Poles] of being reduced to secondclass citizenship were sharply rebuked by Premier Petr Stolypin who told them to be proud of being Russian subjects. 47 Stolypin’s political maneuvering is a poignant example of how the Russian empire fostered Russian welfare at the expense of that of the colonized peoples, while at the same time holding up tyrannical colonialists as models of probity. Western literary history has been combed through by postcolonial critics for similar examples of imperial self-assertion and colonial marginalization: native writers of postcolonial Africa, Asia, and Latin America have added more insights, and Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott have received Nobel Prizes in the process. The former white colonies of the European powers, such as Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia, developed their own distinctive voices in literature, politics, and social life. But the effect of Stolypin’s reforms on those who did not consider themselves to be of Russian nationality is shrouded in silence in Solzhenitsyn’s work. The writer’s failure to incorporate into the narrative a story of the minorities is particularly striking in view of the fact that at the time of writing, the Soviet Russian empire was already coming apart. While the nineteenth-century British writers’ social space was firmly secured by the as-yet-unshaken empire that enveloped them, Aleksandr Solzhenit

syn composed his works at a time when the Russian Empire (in its Soviet incarnation) trembled, faltered, and was partially imploding. In conclusion, Russian writers of the late Soviet and early postSoviet period have not advanced beyond the nineteenth century in their understanding of the country’s complicated political and ethnic situation. The English have learned to make the necessary fine distinctions, but Russian writers continue to place their characters in various spots of the Russian Federation with innocent brutality, and they impose themselves on “Russian” social space that should be at least partially filled with native voices reflecting native visions. The interpreters of the fall of the Soviet Empire have not yet confronted the model of Russia as a stubbornly imperialistic state that has depopulated the Russian mainland to plant Russians in parts of the empire where they hardly belonged. To prevent “white colonies” from claiming control over their own destiny, attempts have been made to saturate them with Muscovite experience, while crowding out native presence and experience. To confirm Moscow’s power over such territories, writers like Rasputin and Solzhenitsyn, racing against time, conjure up visions of the empire as identical with the Russian mainland, albeit existing on the margin of cultural space. In their books, the speaker, whose point of reference is Moscow, maintains a privileged position as the imperial spokesperson, and his or her monologue reduces to invisibility imperial intervention in the geographical and cultural periphery. The socially desirable and empowered space at the empire’s center informs attitudes toward the periphery, which is seen in terms supplied by the center, as in Sania’s vision of Siberian nights in Rasputin’s “You Live and Love.” The erasure of the empire’s prominent minorities in August 14 may be one of the reasons why this novel aged so quickly. Solzhenitsyn refused to admit that the size and ethnic diversity of the empire were significant factors in the development of events. He refused to see the thorny problem of Russian imperialism, though he has eagerly pursued various speculative themes in his novels and essays. He rhetorically asked why Russia developed a vast Gulag system, but he did not see the rise of national awareness within the empire and

the impossibility of holding so many nations together in ways different from those adopted by the Soviets. He spoke of the treachery of certain minorities, but not of their desire for liberty. Writers like Rasputin are of course intellectually inferior to Solzhenitsyn, and their linguistic and conceptual horizons are fully circumscribed by the slogans and invented traditions of Imperium. Thus one cannot extend one s regrets to them—but Solzhenitsyn coujd have done better. The more or less consciously-'choreographed movement for unity between ethnic Russia and her white colonies and minorities has been a persistent feature of Russian literature in the late Soviet period. Russian writers who deal with Siberia as if it was a larder for the Russian mainland are writing in the classical imperialist mode created by Western writers who once looked at Africa and Asia as antechambers and storerooms of the British or French nations. The peoples of Siberia disappear from the picture, not only in the present but also in the past, while Russian-speaking settlers are denied the imagination and courage to press forward for sovereign existence. The Jews continue to be seen through imperial eyes. Late Soviet and early post-Soviet Russian literature displays an inability to recognize, let alone discuss, problems that have been on the Western intellectual agenda for half a century. The refusal of Russian writers to take on problems of the empire is related to the conceptual impoverishment of the Russian language under communism. The simplistic sermonizing of Village Writers is a case in point. The village-oriented metaphors they use lost power through nineteenth-century' overuse. The Village Writers appeal to Russian readers who have no loyalties beyond the biological and the tribal, reinforcing these attitudes rather than opening up new horizons. The kind of nationalism that these writers promote is not advantageous to Russians as individuals, but it is advantageous to the Russian state.

The rhetoric of power routinely used in Russian literature is accompanied by the rhetoric of benevolence toward the conquered territories. It is not natives but Russians who suffer because of Russia’s territorial appropriations, as Rasputin suggests in his descriptions of the Russian settlements in Siberia. This is an innocent vision of imperialism, one that lacks an awareness of its own misdeeds. If Joseph Conrad’s Negroes and Orientals remained mute, there was at least a suggestion in the narrator’s tone that they might have a story to tell. Not even q hint of such a suggestion is present in Rasputin or Rybakov, Astafev or Solzhenitsyn. In regard to Russia’s imperial possessions, the Russian reader today faces a linguistic and literary scene dominated by a monologue of power unaware of itself. The Russian language is now at a stage where it excludes, organically rejects, as it were, concepts and ideas incompatible with the full acceptance of Russia as Imperium. It is implied that the source of all significant action and life within the “Russian” Federation is Russia, and that minority cultures are grateful to Russia for the many benefits they have received from it. The constancy and immobility of that one concept, Russia, is taken for granted by the late Soviet writers. These writers tell us that Russia is a magnet that attracts members of other ethnicities. As Homi Bhabha might say, the persistence of this argument is in itself an indication of the fracturing of imperial security. Somewhere behind the loud proclamation of unity lies an awareness that a territory so vast and so heterogeneous cannot be long maintained as a unitary state in conditions of democracy and universal literacy. The desire to defend the unity no matter what, and creation of texts aimed at preventing or delaying its disintegration, may stem from this fearful realization.

NOTES 1. E. M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1987), 1012. 2. Victor Mote, Siberia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 39. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, vol. 2 (London: James Osgood, 1891), 266. 5. V. S. Novikov, Il'ia Glazunov (Leningrad: Avrora, 1989). 6. Skaz is a typically Slavic form of narrative in which the fictitious narrator is less clever, or less educated, than the presumed average reader. Examples of skaz include Nikolai Gogof’s “The Overcoat” (1842) and, in Polish literature, Jan-Chryzostom Pasek’s Memoirs written in the late sixteenth century and first published in their entirety in 1836. 7. Valentin Rasputin, Uroki frantsuzskogo. Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1987), 73. 8. Mote, 59. 9. Kennan, vol. 1,280. 10. Rasputin, Sibir', Sibir' . . . in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1994), 25; and Kennan Sr., vol. 1,280. 11. Rasputin, vol. 3, 37. 12. Kennan, vol. 1,82.

13. Rasputin, vol. 3,23. 14. Kathleen Hughes, Booklist, 1 June 1996. 15. “On slyshit, kak priblizhaetsia k nemu, strela s chernymi per'iami. On ne shchadit sebia v temnon—rukopashnom—boiu.” Rasputin, Sibir', Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 16. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Mote, 41. 18. Rasputin, vol. 3,18. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 29, 19. 22. Mote, 174-5. 23. Mote, 179. 24. Rasputin, vol. 3,282. 25. W. John Cieslewicz, “A History of the Russian Gold Mining,” Sarmatian Review 5, no. 4 (December 1985), 1-4. 26. Evenkiiskii natsional'nyi okrug numbered eleven thousand inhabitants in 1963, mainly the Evenki. Other Evenki (fourteen thousand) lived in surrounding areas. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' 1964, vol. 2, 683. In the 1970 census, the Tungus or Evenki numbered twenty-five thousand. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (1982), 72. 27. Rybakov speaks of a “Tungus, Tatar [sic] grin” ( tungusskii, mongol'skii oskal in the original) on the face of Lukeshka, a native girl from the village in which Sasha Pankratov resides. Children of

the Arbat, translated by Harold Shukman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 355. Other quotations refer to this translation. Anatolii Rybakov, Deti Arbata (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1987), 244. Other quotations refer to this original edition in Russian. 28. Rybakov, Children of the Arbat, 139. 29. Ibid. , 340, 354, 356,452; and Rybakov, Deti Arbata, 242-5. 30. Rybakov, Children of the Arbat, 357 \ and Deti Arbata, 245. 31. Rybakov, Deti Arbata, 244.. ✓ 32. Rasputin, vol. 3, 222. 33. Mote, 58. 34. V. Astafev’s review of Zhivi i pomni, quoted in Valentin Kurbatov, “V tebe i vokrug: Predislovie,” Valentin Rasputin, Uroki frantsuzskogo, povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1987), 7. This interpretation is confirmed by Christel Lane, The Rights of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society: The Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 23. 35. Rasputin, Poslednii srok, Proshchanie s Materoi, Pozhar (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1986), 376. 36. This is how Bernard Semmel and Irfan Habib describe the relation between Jamaica and Great Britain. Quoted in Said, Culture, and Imperialism, 130, 345. 37. “Ikh bylo tysiachi i tysiachi—ubliudkov, kostolomov, psikhopatov, chvanlivykh samozvantsev, i vse oni, nachinaia ot inkvizitora Torkvemady, dubinoi prolamyvavshego nerazumnym cherepa, chtoby vbit' v nikh samuiu spravedlivuiu veru v gospoda boga, ot konkistadorov, missionerov, bozh'ikh slug i vsevozmozhnykh blagodetelei, pekshikhsia o ‘svobode’ i ‘chistote’ dushi chelovecheskoi, do pripadochnogo fiurera i velikogo kormchego

uporno pytalis' iskorenit' liudskie ‘zabluzhdeniia’.” Viktor Astafev, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1984), 684. 38. Harmon Tupper, To the Great Ocean (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 29. Quoted in Mote, 44. 39. “Pora i nam, pora blagogoveino, strogo i vslukh nazvat' svoiu putevodnuiu, uzhe bezzakatnuiu zvezdu, edinstvenno sposobnuiu vdokhnovit' nash narod na titanicheskii podvig voskreshen'ia bedstvuiushchei Otchizny . . . Sviashchennoe, vse eshche poluzapretnoe imia etoi zvezdy davno na ume u vsekh—ROSSIIA.” I. Pechkin, Poster titled, “A Word about the Eternal” [“Slovo o vechnom”] (Moscow: Panorama, 1990). 40. < http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/bushlib/firstladv/activities/wellesley.htm l> (Raisa Gorbacheva’s comments). 41. Quoted from Clifton Fadiman, ed., Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 42. Vera Tolz, “Conflicting ‘Homeland Myths’ and Nation-State Building in Postcommunist Russia,” Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 267-94. 43. “On Developing a Patriotic and Monarchical Spirit” (1911) in Snyder, 167. 44. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, translated by H. Y. Willetts (New York: Farrar Straus, 1989), 528. 45. Ibid., 605. 46. Seton-Watson, 627. 47. Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1974), 319. The name of Stolypin is also

associated with the invention of the special railway coaches intended to carry prisoners to jails and work camps. These coaches had barred doors and no windows whatever to the outside; the windows faced the corridor, and they were filled with bars. On the outside, the coaches looked very much like normal passenger cars, for their windowless sides were structured in such a way that the nonexistent windows seemed to be covered with blinds. Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, translated by Michael Scammell (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 15-16. 6

Scholarship and Empire RUSSIAN IDEOLOGY IN SOVIET LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP: VIKTOR SHKLOVSKII AND DMITRII LIKHACHEV It has been noted that authority once achieved must have a secure and usable past. 1 The permanence of imperial rule has to be protected not only by military force but also by the prestige of historiography and remembrance. In tsarist Russia, the primary means of protecting the empire were military force, literature, and the arts, rather than discursive writings. But the latter were not entirely neglected. In Soviet Russia, the production of texts useful to the empire involved enhancing, foregrounding, interpreting, and reinterpreting Russia’s past and present in the writings of historians and literary critics. In particular, Russia s Muscovite past was subjected to novel interpretations imbued with the selfconfidence that earlier Russian commentators did not possess. The first case study of these imperial reinterpretations has to do with Viktor Shklovskii, a noted Formalist critic and a survivor of the Soviet purge of Formalism in the 1930s. Unlike fellow critics who moved on to other occupations when Formalism became politically incorrect, Shklovskii did not abandon his profession. Instead, he modified his Formalism to suit the wishes of the powers that were. 2 Taking advantage of the demand for reinterpretations of Russia’s past that would concur with the country’s superpower status, he used his considerable talents to create a new vision of Russian technology and science under Peter the Great. Here is how it happened.

In 1963, the Nestor of socialist realist theory, L. I. Timofeev, thus defined the goals of socialist realism in the Soviet Russian context: “The method of socialist realism manifests itself primarily in interpreting events of the past in the light of those problems which are relevant for us today; in the selection [italics added] of those events of which we should be aware today.” 3 Shklovskii obliged. In On Old Masters: 1714-1812 [O masterakh starinnykh 1714-1812 ] (1951), he provided a fictionalized account of the development of the armament industry in Russia. He pointed out that it dated back to Peter the Great, who had established the metal works in Tula. It should be added that Peter’s ordnance factory had prospered, and within a few years it had begun to manufacture weapons for the entire Russian army. Peter had set up other military production centers as well, and he had entrusted their management to foreigners not because he favored foreigners but because at that time Russian technology was in no position to compete with Western engineering. Some of these foreign managers eventually displeased the tsar or his Preobrazhenskii Office, and they either were imprisoned or managed to escape abroad. 4 In his book, Shklovskii attempted to show that the Tula factories owed their excellence not to imported managers and specialists but rather to native Russian genius. He argued that an English manager, John Jones, who had been credited with inventing machinery and organizing a viable arms factory at Tula, was not the real hero. The real heroes were people like Iakov Batishchev, Andrei Nartov, and Lev Sabakin, all Russians, passionately patriotic and ready to take any abuse from the tsar for the sake of Russia’s greatness. In arguing for this interpretation, Shklovskii tried to discredit the classic book on the Tula factories, I. Gamef’s Historical and Technological Description of the Military Factory at Tula [Opisanie Tul'skogo oruzheinogo zavoda v istoricheskom i tekhnicheskom otnoshenii ] (1826). Gamel 1 had been a collegiate councilor and an associate of various nationalistic institutions (and therefore unlikely to belittle the Russian input into Tula enterprises). His book had been

commissioned by Nicholas I, also unlikely to credit foreigners when honor was due to Russians. The passage of time, however, had created conditions in which improvement of the Russian image concerning the time of Peter the Great could be undertaken. Shklovskii attempted to demonstrate that both Gamel' and Tsar Nicholas had underestimated the Russian contribution to world technology. Here is how he argues. He says that in the 1770s one of the Russians who was sent to England to learn industrial arts actually gave lectures to the English on how to be good lathe operators. This conclusion Shklovskii draws on the basis of records indicating that at that time a certain Russian artisan delivered a talk to the Royal Academy in London. Shklovskii also quotes a letter from the Russian ambassador to Britain, Count Vorontsov, which said that a certain Sumin “could make 200 guineas a year” ( mog zarabatyvat' s lishnim 200 ginei v god). Shklovskii adds that the inventor James Watt was making only two hundred pounds a year and that a certain engineer named Renni received only forty-eight guineas a year—in support of the proposition that Sumin was more valued in England than James Watt himself. There is a catch. Mog zarabatyvat' does not mean zarabatyval. It is a vague and a boastful way of assessing Sumin. It appears that in his letter to the tsar, Count Vorontsov was anxious to present Russian apprentices in a positive way, for failure to perform well abroad meant confiscation of their lands at home. Thus Vorontsov attributed to Sumin a potential that had not been tested by reality. Shklovskii took this arguable potential for fact and concluded that the English learned a significant part of their industrial skills from Russians. 5 It is a clas sic situation whereby Empire manufactures traditions and interpretations for its own populations and eventually for the rest of the world. The enabling circumstance in which Shklovskii labored was a possibility that his books would be sold and read abroad. This indeed has been the case: Shklovskii’s Collected Works in Russian,

from which the above quotations are taken, have reached many a research library in the United States. A concatenation of such unchallenged interpretations has added to the splendor of Old Russia in native and foreign memory. Another instance of interpreting history in ways favorable to the empire is Shklovskii’s handling of information about the machinery displayed in the Tula Museum. Shklovskii says that in the 1940s he saw there armament-production equipment that predated the arrival of the English manager and his artisans. The implication is that both the equipment and the process of production had been satisfactory even before the Englishmen were on the scene. This begs the question of why the foreigners were brought in to begin with. From the time of Peter the Great, the functioning of the Tula enterprises was classified information, and all matters pertaining to them were surrounded by secrecy. If Russians could manage these factories in a satisfactory manner, why did Peter, and after him Alexander I and Nicholas I, permit foreigners to take over the process of production? Shklovskii did not pose that question, let alone answer it. The Russian workers at Tula were unquestionably talented, but they were untypical of the state of Russian industry and technology. O masterakh starinnykh enhances dubious evidence with fanciful sayings ascribed to historical persons (for instance, a worker says that he worked “for the glory of Russia,” somewhat like Valentin Rasputin’s Afonia in Rasputin’s story “The Fire”) in order to augment the prestige of Russian history. By means of such shadings, Shklovskii creates an impression that Russian technology was second to none in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 6 Such ideological procedures have been common in Russian discourse ever since the Russian elites began to perceive an incongruity between their country’s ability to stand up to other polities militarily and the paucity of internal social initiatives and cultural texts. To paraphrase Annette Gordon-Reed’s commentary on the Thomas Jefferson historians spirited denials of Jeffersons’ relationship with Sally Hemings (until DNA evidence made it more than likely),

Russian historians only noticed those incidents of history that fitted the image of their country as a leading world power. 7 As a literary scholar, Dmitrii Likhachev differs markedly from Shklovskii, being in many ways his opposite. While Shklovskii was primarily a literary critic, Likhachev is a historian. Unlikp Shklovskii, who accommodated himself to the Soviet state, Likhachev cherished his reputation as an oppositionist, indeed, he served time in the Gulag. While Shklovskii belonged to the left side of the political spectrum, Likhachev has favored the Russian Right. But that peculiarly Russian confusion of national and imperial identity that they share has allowed Likhachev to collaborate with the state for the sake of enhancing the image of Russian glory among Russians and, eventually, among foreigners. I shall consider here Likhachev’s reinterpretation of certain works of Russian literature of the seventeenth century. Unlike Shklovskii, Likhachev set out to show the equality, not superiority, of Russian culture vis-a-vis the Western ones. Specifically, he set out to prove that the development of Western and Muscovite cultures proceeded along the same trajectory. The second lagged somewhat behind the first, but the fundamentals remained the same. His case in point is the humorous literature of seventeenth-century Muscovy. He says that during the Western Middle Ages, societal responses and expectations concerning entertainment were the same as those that later prevailed under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in Muscovy. In Humor in Old Russia [“Smekhovoi mir” drevnei Rusi ] (1976), Likhachev asserts that the two kinds of humor were grounded in the same societal expectations: “Old Russian humor belongs to the category of [European] medieval humor,” he asserts. 8 Likhachev’s programmatic book The Poetics of Old Russian Literature [Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury ] (1967), extends this similarity to the entire range of literary works: “If one were to define Old Russian literature in the most general sense, one would have to admit that it structurally belonged to the category of medieval

literatures (such as those in the West in a somewhat earlier period).” 9 Likhachev’s comments are misleading at best, and false at worst, when applied to seventeenth-century Muscovite humor (all but one of Likhachev’s examples in Humor in Old Russia come from that century). Likhachev mechanistically applies concepts bred in one culture to another, and he leaves us with a distorted picture of the way in which Muscovite society conducted its business. Why would Likhachev want to endow Russian culture with characteristics it did not possess? One reason might have been his desire to see Russia Europeanized, anchored once and for all in the European cultural community. Another reason is the drive for self-aggrandizement characteristic of empires: Russia must be shown to be “no worse” than the countries of Latinized Europe. His attempt to use his considerable authority to make a dubious case for seventeenthcentury Russian folk literature is worth noting. Let us first look at the situation in the Latinized part of Europe, where arose the Middle Ages. One of the characteristic manifestations of medieval humor was the carnival and the celebrations and customs it generated. The French Mardi Gras and the Bavarian Fasching are contemporary remnants of the period of festivities preceding Lent, during which the customary social, political, and religious hierarchies were temporarily suspended and their opposites were temporarily installed. A historian of carnival festivities, Enid Welsford, has observed that during that period, “mighty persons were humbled, sacred things profaned, laws relaxed and ethnic ideals reversed, under the leadership of a Patriarch, Pope, or Bishop of Fools.” 10 In twelfth-century France, the Feast of Fools was celebrated, during which a complete reversal of ordinary custom occurred. The lowest deacon of the cathedral was declared bishop or pope or king—depending on the locality— and led his fellow deacons into the stalls of the higher clergy. Then a burlesque mass was performed: the altar was censed with pudding and sausages, and brays and howls replaced the usual responses of the faithful during mass. On occasion, mock consecrations of

bishops were performed. In 1498, citizens of Toumai in France captured some clerics of Notre-Dame and “consecrated” them as bishops. In other localities, the “abbatian cross” was handed to the citizen who had done the most foolish deed over the year. Similar make-believe ceremonies took place regarding the political order, to mention only the tradition of the carnival kings and queens. In apparent irreverence toward the actual monarch, a commoner was “elected” king by a crowd of people celebrating the carnival. Depth psychology has taught us to interpret such manifestations of gaiety in a way that accounts for their ambivalence. A revulsion and protest against religious norms and rules was certainly an element of such shows; however, it was not the only component. The civil and religious authorities, however reluctantly, showed remarkable indulgence toward these antics. Suffice it to say that at medieval universities, which were the barometers of medieval attitudes, students got more days off for the carnival than for Christmas or Easter. 11 Given the authoritarian habits of medieval society, such tolerance seems highly unusual. How could it be explained? To answer this question, let us consider some aspects of the relationship between humor and law in medieval Europe. The carnival pranks and mock celebrations seemed funny to the citizens of medieval towns because they embodied a temporary relaxation of norms, a world upside down, a make-believe reversal of what the people knew was the actual order of things. As Ernst Curtius pointed out, there existed in medieval Europe the topos of “the world upside down,” which was one of the principal devices of medieval humor. 12 This topos generated laughter for the reasons later defined by Kant, in his reflections on humor as the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. 13 Out of such traditions Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel were bom. These books are loaded with examples of the medieval humorous topos of the world upside down: the circumstances of, and occurrences during, Gargantua’s and PantagrueTs births and education, Pantagruel’s visit to the land of Satin, and his founding of

the Abbey of Theleme. The abbey represents a total reversal of the medieval idea of the monastery. It admits both sexes, everyone is free to come and go as he or she pleases, only good looking and young men and women are admitted, and everybody is governed by whatever occasions and opportunities might arise. The motto of the monastery is: Do as thou wilt. Such stories seemed funny to the readers of Rabelais because they described a world upside down, one which the laughing person did not take seriously, because it was governed by rules which ran counter to those generally believed to be true. If we agree with Kant’s observations about humor, it follows that the concept of law must have been firmly embedded in, and accepted by, the minds of medieval Europeans, inasmuch as .departures from it seemed unreal and therefore funny. It should also be reemphasized that these medieval pranks did not occasion inquisitorial investigations of the possible heretical proclivities of the participants, even though at first sight they involved serious encroachments against prevailing doctrine. This in turn is an indication of a measure of trust that the medieval authorities had in ordinary men and women of the time. Fear that such reversals of what is proper would lead to the abandonment of what is right apparently was not strong enough to lead the authorities to try to uproot carnival festivities and the imaginative games they occasioned. Ernst Curtius implicitly takes this position in his presentation of the Weltanschauung of the typical men and women in the Middle Ages. Let us now look at the works of the seventeenth-century Russian humor in order to see whether similar processes were evident there. Did the topos of the world upside down, so central to medieval humor, generate laughter in Moscow? According to Likhachev, the narrative “The Kaliazin Petition” [’’Kaliazinskaia chelobitnaia”] is a typical example of Muscovite humor. It tells the story of the archimandrite Gavriil, who introduced in his monastery “unusual” customs and rules: he ordered his monks to get up early, go to church, and pray; he made them fast and wear shabby clothes; and he spent money on incense and candles instead of food and drink.

The monks complained about these innovations to the bishop and petitioned for reinstitution of the old ways. Like the description of the Abbey of Theleme, “Petition” is meant to be funny. But while in the first case we are asked to laugh at a departure from the rules, in the second we are requested to laugh, as it were, at the rules. The narrative tone of the “Petition” does not convey hostility toward, or condemnation of, the roguish monks. No moral can be drawn from the story unless it be a conclusion that one should sidestep the rules if one has an opportunity to do so. If we were to assess the seventeenth-century Russian humor on the basis of this narrative} we would have to say that in Old Muscovy, humor was associated with disregard for the rule of law. By laughing at someone who according to the rules was a perfectly good and reasonable abbot, readers of “Petition” displayed an attitude that belittled the rules and “the world as it is supposed to be” (the medieval norm) and accepted as normal “the world upside down.” In “The Kaliazin Petition,” the object of ridicule is the world according to the rules, the ideal world. Let us see whether this kind of humorous topos was in any way recurrent in Old Russian literature. The narrative “A Story about Joyful and Comfortable Living” [’’Skazanie o roskoshnom zhitii i veselii”] is a description of an ideal world where everything is plentiful and rivers flow with milk and honey. It is, in short, the Russian version of Ovid’s Aurea prima sata est aetas, que vindice nullo, / Sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat. But unlike Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, “A Story” is meant to be funny. This is indicated by the roguish “road directions” provided at the end: And the direct road to these joys goes from Krakow through Arshava and then through Mozovsha, and from there toward Riga and Lettland, and then toward Kyiv and Podoletsk, and from there toward Stekol'nia and Korela, and then toward Iur'ev and Brest, and then again toward Bykhov and into Chernigov and Pereiaslav', and then into Circassian, Chigirian and Kafim lands. And whoever crosses the Danube will not get home. 14

The unreality of these road directions is enhanced by colloquialisms in the names of cities and regions ( Arshava, Mozovsha, Podoletsk, Korela ), and by the absurd rhymed phrases (a kogo perevezut Dunai). Again, what strikes one is that the Golden Age rather than the imperfect and deformed world fulfills the role of a humorous topos. Good and comfortable living is something one laughs at rather than aspires to. The lawful world is subject of ridicule, whereas the lawless world is taken as the norm. A strikingly cynical attitude emerges from these two narratives. They deny the possibility of a good life for the people who are the target audience of these tales. One tentatively concludes that in seventeenthcentury Muscovy, the worldview of ordinary people included the idea that comforts and merriments were for the princes only, and that to separate them from political pov/er was ridiculous. On to other texts: “A Story about Shemiaka’s Judgment” [’’Povest 1 o Shemiakinom sude”] enjoyed wide popularity in numerous editions up to and during the nineteenth century. 15 Once there were two brothers, one rich and one poor. The poor one sponged on the rich one for years ( bogatyi zhe ssuzhaia mnogo let ubogova ) until the rich one lost his patience and sued his brother for negligent treatment of a borrowed horse. On his way to the courthouse, the poor brother’s negligence caused the death of two people. He now faced three suits instead of one. When he arrived at the courthouse, he showed the judge a stone wrapped up in a piece of cloth. The judge thought that it was a bribe and ruled in the poor brother’s favor in all three cases. When the time came to deliver the bribe, the poor brother told the judge that he had meant to kill him if the verdict was against him. The judge was so pleased to have avoided such a fate that he let the poor brother go undisturbed. Having extorted money from his former victims (in addition to the favorable ruling from the judge), the poor brother left for home rejoicing and praising the Lord ( ubogi otyde v dom svoi, raduiasia i khvalia Boga ). One could of course insist that the story merely takes the side of the poor against the rich: in that capacity, it appeared in a volume

entitled Russian Democratic Satire of the Seventeenth Century [Russkaia demokraticheskaia satira semnadtsatogo veka] (1977). In such a case, we should be laughing at the unexpected victory of the poor and powerless over the rich and powerful. But that would be stretching the point. What shines through this story is cynicism, not righteous indignation at the fate of the poor. The poor brother is cruel, selfish, and dishonest. He is also a negligent worker. His success in the story reinforces the idea that lawlessness is the norm, that this is the way the world runs, and that one should proceed accordingly. The story is one of a crook who is a winner, whereas those in the right—his brother, the priest, the bather whose father was killed, and the law itself—have been ridiculed. Again, laughter is linked to a defiance of rules and norms. Another example: in the narrative “A Story about a Peasant s Son [ Skazanie o krest'ianskom syne”], a thief robs a peasant’s house. While doing so, he mutters what seem pious words‘(which later turn out to be blasphemies), and the peasant, thinking that an angel from heaven has come to visit him, allows him to go away with his bounty. One is left with the “moral” that the clever use of blasphemy is the surest road to fortune. Again, this tale suggests that in Old Muscovy, denigration of norms, rules, and ideals was a common component of humorous works, that laughter and ridicule were directed at those who observed the law, while those who disobeyed it were objects of admiration. The same can be said of the best-known work of seventeenthcentury Russian humor, “The Story of Frol Skobeev” [“Povest' o Frole Skobeeve”] wherein a clever crook wins over hapless honest people. In fact, it has been said already, by the English scholar Anthony Stokes: “The tale has not even the excuse of describing scandalous behavior as a dire warning to sinners. The rogue and thief, as Frol is called throughout, prospers, leaving as the only possible moral that seduction is the surest road to fortune.” 16 Stokes could have said it, mutatis mutandis, of the majority of works of seventeenth-century Muscovite humor. They all suggest that “the world according to norms” is to be ridiculed or disbelieved and that

“the world upside down” is to be accepted as normal. While in Western medieval literature, humorous or otherwise, a conviction prevailed that the world “should” be decent, that people “should” be living well, and that their misfortunes and disasters were in some sense a deviation from the “norm,” in Old Russian literature no such presumption is evident. Just the opposite is the case: it is normal to cheat and steal, and one should applaud rascals rather than honest men, because the former turn out to be successful and the latter tend to be losers. Historians confirm this apparent lack of understanding in Russian culture of the concept of law and norm. Richard Pipes writes: % Students of peasant life in Russia have noted that the muzhik lacked a sense of law as something permanent, eternal, that is, something grounded in a higher rationality. What he had was a keen sense for the living law, which meant a decree or ordinance. When he was told to do something and he could not avoid doing it, the muzhik would carry out the order. But he never saw any underlying logic to these commands and obeyed only because he was under duress. Engelhardt, a brilliant essayist on peasant life, wrote over a century ago that peasants did not even understand that they must pay taxes every year, even though they always had done so in the past. Every year, the peasants expected a new decree to be issued, ordering them to pay taxes; if no decree came out, they would not pay. This is in striking contrast to Western perceptions of law. 17 Likhachev was a knowledgeable student of Russian affairs, and he was certainly not unfamiliar with the phenomenon Pipes describes. Yet against the evidence of history and literature, he argued that there were no fundamental differences in social behavior and political culture between Muscovite and Western societies. Likhachev’s interpretation makes sense as part of the massive Russian effort to bring up to European standards the perception of Empire both among Russians and among foreign students of Russian culture. But why was Likhachev arguing an apparently

indefensible point? Whence comes this repetitious defiance of the ideal rules of behavior, and why did the topos of “the world according to the rules” acquire humorous overtones in Muscovite literature? Why did a reverse ordering take place in Western and Central Europe? At least in part, the reasons for this may be the following. 18 First, the narratives quoted above (as well as other versified narratives found in Russian Democratic Satire of the Seventeenth Century ) suggest that in Old Russia there existed a social trend that brought together humor and defiance of the law, or humor and sinfulness (needless to say, there was no separation of church and state in Old Muscovy). Things lawful were ridiculed, and they appeared funny to those who listened to the “democratic satire” narratives. In this context, humorous works tended to ridicule the law rather than uphold it. In Latinized Europe, an opposite development can be discerned: medieval humor is based on the premise that spectacular departures from the law are funny. The Muscovite development might have issued from the Byzantine tradition, which was entirely humorless, as opposed to the Western tradition, which made allowance for pranks, mockery, and temporary and controlled reversals of the law. Byzantine Christianity frowned upon merrymaking and humor to a much greater extent than did the Western Church. Two favorite saints of Russian Orthodoxy, John Chryzostom and Ephraim of Syria, wrote exhortations against laughter and merriment. While Ephraim’s teachings were directed at monks rather than lay people, they were understood as referring to both. 19 Sixteenth-century travelers to Muscovy were struck by the absence of merrymaking in everyday life of that country. 20 Ephraim was probably an indirect source for the joyless lifestyle recommended by Domostroi, the sixteenth-century book of household rules. This book tells us that playing the bandura, laughing, and dancing are sure roads to hell. It advises fathers not to smile at their sons but instead to show them a severe and gloomy countenance. 21 In contrast, the saints who were popular in the West tended to tolerate, even approve of, gaiety: Benedict tacitly

permitted moderate laughter, Anthony’s discourse was spiced with godly wit, and Martin used to tell devout jests. Similarly, the Scholastics generally argued in favor of laughter and jest. 22 Thus Byzantine austerity contributed to a hostility toward laughter in the social conventions of Muscovy. Eventually, these customs were codified into law. In 1648, the teenage tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich issued several edicts in which corporal punishment ( knut ) was promised to those who laughed, joked, sang songs in public or in private, or played cards, chess, or other social games; or even swung on a swing. 23 These edicts were directed not only against the wandering actors-entertainers ( skomorokhi ) but against private households. In 1672, in violation of his own edicts, Aleksei asked the Moscow clergyman Gottfried Gregorii to assemble a theatrical troupe for court entertainment. Gregorii fulfilled the request and organized the first Russian court theater, which performed some highly stylized Biblical and historical plays at the Moscow court. Aleksei was so worried about his own trespass that he sought the advice of his confessor, who promptly released him from the orders imposed by himself. The Moscow theater lasted for only four years. After Aleksei’s death, the new tsar, Fedor, closed it down. In the 1551 collection of church regulations, the Stoglav, a special chapter was devoted to condemnation of the entertainment provided by skomorokhi. The Stoglav inveighs against inviting the minstrels to weddings or churches. It bemoans the indulgence of priests who allowed the actors to accompany wedding parties to the church, and it forbids such practices. In his study of the subject, Russell Zguta has pointed out that these Russian minstrels were treated with more or less effective animosity by both Church and state authorities. 25 It appears that this animosity was extended to other forms of merrymaking. The enforcement of the Stoglav lagged'until the mid-seventeenth century, when the skomorokhi were practically eliminated from Muscovite life. In his edicts of 1648, Tsar Aleksei banned them, and the Church excommunicated them in 1657.

The Old Believers likewise condemned mirth and entertainment. In his autobiography, the leader of the Old Believers, Avvakum, says that he once encountered a band of itinerant skomorokhi and proceeded to break up their instruments and set their bears free. This was certainly an act of charity toward the bears, but hardly toward the skomorokhi. It is significant that in Ivan the Terrible’s later years, which were marked by violence and despotism, the tsar spent much time in the company of the skomorokhi. 26 He once forced Archbishop Pimen to parade about the city in the company of veselye liudi (which was another name for the minstrels). The association of tyranny and merriment must have further strengthened the social convention according to which sin and mirth were somehow related. It appears that the assumption that humor and the denigration of “the world as it is supposed to be” are two sides of the same coin exerted a crucial influence on the humorous literature of Old Russia, and it made this literature different from that in Western and Central Europe. The idea of culpability of laughter qua laughter never took root in Western societies, with their yearly carnivals and long tradition of spontaneous merrymaking to which neither the Church nor the state objected in a strenuous manner. One result of this situation was the development in Russia of humorous literature that ridiculed the law and “the world according to the rules.” In Muscovite Russia, humor acquired the taste of the forbidden fruit and it became associated with breaking the law. This is why derision at “the world as it is supposed to be” and denigration of “the world according to the rules” or “the ideal world” became a recurring topos in Old Russian humorous literature. It was the humorous writer’s revenge on rules and customs that denied him the right openly to practice his craft. He lashed out against all laws, throwing the hammer after the hatchet, as it were, and he ridiculed all who did not seek to circumvent them. Humor and merriment appear to be among the fundamental human needs and patterns of behavior. The creation of an association

between it and lawlessness acted as a deterrent to the development in Muscovy of respect for the law qua law and possibly strengthened society’s tolerance of autocracy, of ad hoc laws, and of primacy of ruler over state laws. The humorous literature of Old Muscovy suggests that unless one was bom into privilege, the only way to acquire it is to break the law. On the basis of this specific case study, it can be said that Muscovite literature differed from the literature of medieval Europe in a fundamental way. The latter affirmed the rules in the very act of laughing at them, whereas the former denigrated the rules and held them up to ridicule. Old Russian literature and Western medieval literature thus represent separate categories in the humorous literatures of the world. Likhachev’s attempt to present them as stemming from the same Scholarship and Empire 163 social customs exemplifies the prestige building in which Russian intellectuals have engaged at various times and in different ways. While all empires engaged in such activities, the peculiar feature of the Russian empire has been that in doing so, its spokespersons seldom felt secure enough to cease trying to measure up to other contestants in the scramble for cultural leadership. Likhachev conceded a time lag but not a radically different development of social values and norms. He disregarded the differences in social customs and expectations between the despotic and austere Muscovy and the self-assured and “laid back” medieval Europe. Impelled by an imperial urge, he verbalized once more the wish for parity with the West that Russian elites have frequently displayed. Like Shklovskii and others before him, he was ready to satisfy that wish at the expense of historical accuracy. SELF-INTERPRETATION IN THE YEARS OF THE STALIN-HITLER PACT

Shklovskii and Likhachev were empire builders, in that they used their eloquence to present an advantageous picture of the empire’s remote past in order to make the past useful for the present. But the Russian communist state in which they both lived and wrote was an impatient empire when it came to current history, and it required the services of less scholarly individuals to legitimize its institutions and authority and to inculcate beliefs and conventions of behavior. In the periods of rapid change occasioned by military interventions, instant commentary was needed to affix in collective memory a prescriptive notion of what had happened. This procedure included vilification of the enemy by various rhetorical means, as well as glorification of the victorious Soviets. The rapid imposition of a new ideology required services of men of letters of a less benign disposition than either Shklovskii or Likhachev. Taking instant advantage of defeated enemies and indulging in printed prevarications, numerous Russian intellectuals and journalists cooperated fully with Soviet imperial goals. The Soviets persistently used rhetorical flourishes in order to consolidate their imperial winnings. An instance of that strategy appeared in the Soviet Russian press in the years of the Soviet-Nazi friendship, 1939—41. In that period, many newspapers and periodicals dealt with nations and states overpowered by the USSR in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 (otherwise known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, or the Stalin-Hitler pact), which divided Central and Eastern European nations between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It should be emphasized that American interpretations of that period of Russian history have generally eschewed issues of colonialism and nationalism. The Soviet occupation of the three' Baltic republics, parts of Finland (eventually annexed to the “Russian” Federation), of Poland’s western Ukraine and western Belarus (as well as parts of ethnic Poland), and parts of Romania (Romanian Bessarabia was eventually annexed by the USSR) have not been viewed in colonialist terms; rather, they have been considered the actions of a communist state desirous to spread communism beyond its borders. The issue of Russian imperi alism, it is alleged, played a minor if not negligible part in the process. According to Adam Ulam,

The main factor in the decisions of 1939 was not nationalism in the proper sense of the word, though as a result the Soviet Union gathered most of the territories lost in the post-world War I settlement, absorbed for the first time in Russian history the Ukrainians of Galicia, and attempted less successfully to reclaim the tsarist heritage in Finland and to realize traditional Russian aspirations in the Straits. Nor can the decision be classified as a dramatic rejection of the ideological premises of Communism. . . . The aspirations of nationalism and the analytical framework of Communism become simply subsumed in the interest of the totalitarian regime. 27 Like Ulam, Alexander Dallin bypasses colonialism and nationalism altogether, in his influential article “Soviet Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” as does Stephen Cohen in his ill-timed (it came out in 1985) study of forces that made Soviet society strong. 28 In an earlier work that combined the “totalitarian” and “historicist” approaches, Merle Fainsod argued that under Stalin, notwithstanding the pressures of Russian chauvinism and local nationalisms, the party tended to follow the policy expressed in Stalin’s dictum about being nationalist in form and communist in content. Fainsod observed that “Stalin envisioned a multi-national state which remained in essence a CommiN nist monolith.” 29 That meant that in practice, national cohesiveness was tolerated and even encouraged if it served as recreation and manifested itself in folk art, dancing, and music, but the divisive aspect of nationalism was discouraged regardless of its origin. Any attempts to use nationhood as a mobilizing force in the process of liberation from Empire were punished most severely, argued Fainsod. It goes without saying that communist ideology played a role in the policies of the Soviet state in the 1930s and 1940s; this does not preclude other influences, however. Generally speaking, interpretations centered on the communist ideology deemphasize the problem of colonialism based on national selfaggrandizement,

stressing the contingencies of the here and now. They emphasize change while nationality, in the sense of group cohesiveness, can be construed as a way of resisting change; hence within a communismoriented, historicist interpretation, there is no room for the issue of colonial acquisitions based on historical memory. To show the inadequacy of a purely historicist approach, I propose to look at the Soviet nationality policies in the period of the Soviet-Nazi friendship between August 1939 and June 1941, in order to find out whether patterns of ideological behavior in that period were relevant to the problem of empire building or were merely driven by a desire to bring communism to all of Europe. I further argue that notwithstanding the communist component, the Soviet Russian state was heir to the colonialism of the tsarist empire, whose colonialist policies fed into the Soviet ideological designs. Between 1939 and 1941, one observes an unprecedented intensification of nationalistic press propaganda, which indicates that the issue of national identity and the subservient status of the nations subjugated during that period was very much on the agenda of the Soviet policy planners. 30 During these years, aggressive Russian nationalism had its heyday, whereas later, during the war with Hitler, toleration, even encouragement, of other nationalisms was in evidence. There exists an incongruity between the eventfulness of the 1939-41 period of Soviet history and the relatively weak positioning of the period in American Soviet studies, as well as in postcommunist Russian studies. Never before that time had the Soviet Union so successfully expanded and incorporated entire nations and states, and never again would it succeed in so spectacular a manner. Unlike Nazi Germany, which had to give up its wartime bounty, the Soviets kept most of theirs, territorially speaking. In the 1939^41 period occurred the most successful colonial expansion in the entire history of Russia. The annexations of that time resulted in five new union republics, the Moldavian, Karelo-Finnish (downgraded in 1956 to an autonomous republic within the “Russian” Federation, perhaps to preclude possible future claims by Finland), Lithuanian, Latvian, and

Estonian, and the enlargement of two existing republics, the Ukrainian and Belarusian. 31 The seven affected republics contained people who spoke nine different languages, none of them Russian. In a 1 August 1940 speech, Viacheslav M. Molotov boasted that the population of the Soviet Union had increased by twenty-three million in a single year. 32 The annexed lands were lost to Germany for a while, but they soon became the main theater of war, shielding ethnic Russia from the ravages of marauding armies and their artillery fire. They were reclaimed after World War II and, with minor adjustments, remained part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia initiated independence processes somewhat earlier). While nominally independent, Central Europe likewise had to function within the political, economic, and military constraints imposed by Moscow. The Central Asian and Caucasian republics of the Soviet Union also changed significantly during that time: in 1940, their alphabets were changed from Latin or Arabic to Cyrillic. 33 The change of alphabets alone constituted a major colonialist appropriation of the cultures of the unassimilated peoples on Russia’s eastern and southern borders, whereas the military domination of the new republics and of Central Europe was an act of imperial self-assertion linking “old” tsarist Russia to the “new” communist Russia. That much can be concluded from a survey of the Soviet Russian press of the period, in which appeals were made primarily to national and imperial feelings of Russians rather than to communist internationalism. The secret protocols of the Stalin-Hitler pact dealt with spheres of interest in Europe. They represented a classic case of internal colonialism, marginalizing small and mid-sized nations and assigning them the status of “in-between peripherality,” to use Totosy de Zepentek’s term. According to the protocols, the Soviets were to control the territory of Romanian Bessarabia; the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland; and the Second Polish Republic east of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. 34 The territories acquired by the Soviets in 1939-40 were patchworks of ethnic communities who had lived in remarkable harmony, by the standards of World War II warfare and the subsequent Sovietinduced

“ethnic cleansing.” 35 After the Soviet takeover, these ethnically diverse people were dispersed in various directions in accordance with the Soviet plan, but this process was complicated by the SovietFinnish war, by World War II, and by the ideological necessity of adding a Marxist veneer to military victories over populations that the Russian state had coveted since long before the communists appeared on the scene. These complications, and the variety of the national interests involved, made governing the conquered territories difficult. 36 The goal was to create a perception that Marxist ideology was the only factor and guide in the treatment of the conquered. 37 In reality, aggressive nationalism played a major role, exploding in murderous and destructive ways. In May 1940, the lead article in a party journal, Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, asserted that information about state policy should be conveyed through the press and not by the memoranda of party secretaries. “The living word in a newspaper is incomparably stronger and more effective than any number of memoranda and directives on which secretaries of the regional committees often waste much time,” said the article, which also taught editors how to plan for desired results and how to present a point of view effectively. That year, articles about managing the press appeared virtually every month in Partiinoe stroitel'stvo. They reflected the ruling elites’ seriousness about press interpretations of the rapidly changing political and military scene, and about the usefulness of the press for manufacturing interpretations advantageous to the empire. During 1939-41 Pravda, Izvestiia, Literaturnaia gazeta, and other major Russian dailies and weeklies articulated correct attitudes and opinions about the conquered nations. The repetitious recastings of facts were obviously meant to be internalized, to become parts of a pattern that served the metropolitan center. The press encouraged nationalistic rancor by means of articles, poems, reports, testimonials, and slogans. As J. T. Gross has pointed out, in those uncertain times a printed encouragement to be abusive toward the

socially undesirable subalterns amounted to a hunting license for the criminal segment of society. 38 Thus Ukrainians and Belarusians were pitted against Poles in western Ukraine and western Belarus. During the war with the Finns, the press tried to generate hatred against the “White Finns” ( Belofiny ), pretending that Finnish society was split into two halves, one sympathetic to the Soviets and ready to be incorporated, and the other hostile to them. An attempt to pit Karelians against the Finns, by declaring Finnish rather than Karelian the language of the newly created Karelo-Finnish Republic, was part of this campaign. A hate campaign was launched against the Romanians in Bukovina and Bessarabia when these territories were annexed, and “Ukrainian nationalists” were also attacked. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, German culture and Germans received their share of contempt and vilification. The only national group never vilified was the Russian, while the most protracted campaign was against the Poles. These press campaigns supply massive evidence about the colonial strategies of the Russians in that period. For about a month after the Soviet invasion of Poland, virtually every issue of each major Soviet Russian newspaper contained at least one hostile article or poem about Poland and Poles, with a height of thirty-nine in Pravda on 19 September 1939. Poland was presented as a country of inept, brutal people who had somehow managed to survive between two highly civilized nations, Germany and Russia. The press encouraged hatred of “nobleman’s Poland” {panskaia Pol'sha ), Polish gentry {pol'skie party), “the gentlemen” {party ), or simply “Poles,” ignoring the fact that the government of the Second Polish Republic had abolished all titles of nobility. The connotations of the word pan in Russian indicate that the press was referring not only to social class but also, and primarily, to nationality and to Polish social manners—traditionally perceived by Russians as pretentious and excessively rooted in the behavior of the upper classes (witness the use of pan in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov)? 9 Against this assortment of Polish targets an abusive vocabulary was used in articles, poems, and stories, written by

Russians of otherwise spotless reputations. The Poles were vilified in ways that may seem ineffective and naive to an American but that stirred up emotions in conditions of war and poverty. Poland was presented as a place where a small group of Polish nobles brutalized millions of Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. An impression was being created among the readers of Pravda and other newspapers that Poland was inhabited mainly by non-Poles who welcomed their liberation. Witnesses of horrors under Polish rule wrote testimonials for newspapers at home and abroad, and Hitler’s allegations about Poland were approvingly quoted. The press also offered its interpretations of rumors about deportations to Siberia and Central Asia. Provincial Russian papers took their cues about wording and descriptions of events from these major publications. What appeared in Pravda one day was likely to appear in lzvestiia on the same day or the next, and a day or so later in the regional and specialized newspapers and magazines. Local pravdas published day-old articles from the Moscow Pravda. If over a four-week period many articles were written about the same issue, it was considered important: a point of view was being advocated and given high priority. An isolated article on a particular issue indicated that the issue was not of the highest priority at a given time. In contrast to the period of Soviet-Nazi cooperation, from January 1937 to September 1939 the Soviet Russian press had devoted little space to Poles, Finns, or Romanians. Virtually no articles indicated an awareness, on the part of the editors, of plans to absorb the territories where these peoples lived. Even though ranking members of the party had occasionally discussed such plans, no attempt was made to engineer a public perception of the necessity of annexations. 40 In the late 1930s, editors of the major Soviet periodicals viewed East Central Europe as part of the West, culturally speaking. Occasional articles designated the region Western. Czech and Polish newspapers were quoted in surveys of the Western press; the literature of these countries was said to be Western. On 5 May 1938, for example, N. Pozharskii’s “Soviet

Literature in the West” in Literaturnaia gazeta quoted translations of Soviet writers into Polish and Czech, as well as English, French, and German. Pozharskii stated that Germany led Western European countries in translations of Soviet authors, that Czechoslovakia and Poland tied for the second place, and France was third. Ostensibly, party publications did not anticipate the alliance with Hitler and published articles unfriendly to the Germans. However, the gloating persistence with which they announced anticipated Nazi attacks on countries that the Russians were to occupy in the near future indicates otherwise. In January 1939, Partiinoe stroitel'stvo featured a section entitled “The fight against fascism and war” [“ Bor'ba protiv fashizma i voiny”], dealing with Germany. In the international section of this biweekly, la. Viktorov complained that “Romania and Poland have been marked as the next victims of fascist aggression. . . . The fascists are getting ready to attack Romania, Poland and Lithuania.” 41 On 20 June 1939, Literaturnaia gazeta, and on 1 August 1939 Leningradskaia pravda, spoke critically of Germany, and only days before the signing of the pact Pravda still wrote of “the persecution of Poles in Germany,” an “anti-Polish demonstration in Gdansk [Danzig],” “fascist-occupied Czechoslovakia” (20 August) and of the “continuation of the antiPolish campaign in Germany” (21 August). Over the centuries, Russians had allied with Germany for a colonial bounty consisting of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine; the possibility of another such alliance could hardly have been ruled out in long-term Soviet planning. The signing of the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on 23 August 1939 eliminated any further criticism of Nazi Germany. The word “fascist” disappeared, and literally overnight the press adopted a proNazi point of view regarding Europe. An anti-Polish, anti-Finnish, and antiRomanian propaganda campaign followed. From 24 August, events on the Polish-German border were reported from thf official Nazi point of view. References to the Polish press

disappeared, and the Volkischer Beobachter was frequently quoted. On 27 August, Pravda said that German newspapers spoke of “the growing danger of German-Polish military conflict”; implying that both parties had contributed to the rise of the hostilities, the message thus signaled an openly anti-Polish shift. On 31 August, five lines on the last page of Pravda said that general mobilization had been announced in Poland and that all railway traffic between Poland and Germany had ceased. Several days later, the Nazi invasion of Poland was reported as “military action between Germany and Poland.” The wartime sufferings and inconveniences of Berliners were described in the 5 September Pravda. On the same day, Pravda said that the Polish authorities had arrested two German diplomats and implied that the Germans would have to take appropriate steps in response. The next day, Pravda reported that two Polish diplomats had been arrested in Berlin in retaliation for the Polish action. According to Pravda, Poles had also violated the Soviet border: four days before the Soviet invasion of Poland, Polish warplanes had crossed into the USSR without permission, said the newspaper on 14 September. Finansovaia gazeta echoed this line on 15 September. On 13 September Pravda announced a supposedly antiPolish uprising in “eastern Galicia,” which the Soviets invaded four days later. Literary circles of the USSR were likewise engaged in justifying Soviet imperial designs on Poland. The campaign of nationalistically oriented hostilities was launched at a meeting of the Moscow chapter of the Union of Soviet Writers held on the day of the Soviet invasion of Poland and reported the next day in Pravda. The meeting was chaired by Fedor Gladkov. Over two hundred writers attended. Predictably, they decided to support the invasion and sent a letter to Stalin to that effect: The Polish state, created through suppression and exploitation of national minorities, built on forceful Polonization of Ukrainians and Belarusians, bent on total annihilation of their culture . . . has fallen apart at the first serious trial. . . . We salute the beloved Red Army,

defender of the oppressed, glory and pride of the Soviet nation . . [AJ11 free, equal and happy nations of the Soviet Union . . . support the government and the party of Lenin and Stalin. 42 Among the signatories were Margarita Aliger, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Fedor Gladkov, Ii'ia Selvinskii, and Ukrainian writer Mykola Chemiavskii, who later perished in Stalin’s Gulag. Thus started the period of vilification of things Polish and a presentation of Poland as a place where a few Polish nobles ipany) oppressed a great number of national minorities. Articles with titles such as “Holy Hatred” [“Sviataia nenavist'”] were massively printed to whip up emotions and encourage pogroms against Poles. 43 On 19 September in Pravda, Margarita Aliger published a hatefilled poem entitled “17 September 1939,” the date of the invasion of Poland. The poem stands out even among the Pole-baiting pronouncements of the time: Suddenly, time split apart, And fresh air burst in— A voice was heard around us, [I]t was Justice talking to the World In the great Russian tongue. Our honesty spoke up, Our truth delivered a speech. The heart will remember this day, Do not forget it, comrades! On that day, our Soviet boys Commenced their great march Into the country of distress enter our detachments. 44

This was not an ode to Stalin written by someone desperately trying to hold on to life but an expression of a deeply held conviction that Poland must perish, that it must be subjugated by the “boys” speaking “the great Russian tongue. It is significant that in the poem the adjective “great” is reserved for things Russian rather than Soviet. In conditions of aggressive war waged by the Soviet Imperium, Aliger’s praise of the Russian language was not unlike the Nazi writers’ praise of the superiority of German culture. Aliger’s fury was partly due to her communist convictions. She believed in the communist fictions which had turned awfully wrong even in her time and would collapse in the 1980s after doing unspeakable harm to individuals and cultures. The poem, however, was also grounded in that older Russian tradition of colonial desire, of celebrating “the Russian flag over the white Khiva,” of urging the Caucasus to humble itself before General Ermolov, of rejoicing at General Suvorov’s slaughter of civilians in Warsaw and at General Skobelev s slaughter of civilians in the Central Asian fortress of Geok-Tepe. The rhetorical appropriation of victory is evident in all these cases, justifying for the empire’s titular nationality the expenditure of resources and lives, and presenting that expenditure as an investment in Russia’s, or the Soviet Union’s, civilizing mission. The same issue of Pravda printed an additional thirty-eight articles, poems, stories, and testimonials about the Soviet invasion of Poland. This massive effort at interpretive mediation indicates that Pravda was poised to erase any doubts among the Russian-speaking segment of the Soviet population as to the appropriateness of the invasion. It also appears that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact inspired self-confidence in the managers of the press: it took a great deal of self-confidence to report the invasion of a neighboring country as a victory for peace and justice. On 15 October 1939, Literaturnaia gazeta made it known that the military invasion of Poland was being followed by a cultural appropriation. Soon after the Red Army moved in, the paper said,

writers and journalists had gone in “to conduct meetings, distribute leaflets and articles to newspapers, and participate in the local government.” This meant that Russian writers and journalists took over the editorial offices of Polish publications. The fate of the Polish journalists was not reported at that time, but other sources indicate that those whom the Russians replaced were dismissed, executed, or sent to the Gulag. 45 On 30 September 1939, Pravda published two poems, one by Samuil Marshak and the other by Viktor Gusev. Marshak’s “In Those Days” [“V eti dni”] describes the entry of the Red Army into the town of Molodechno, in western Ukraine. Here “Ukrainians and Belarusians, young and old” greet the Soviets “in a friendly fashion.” The soldiers lift up the children and promise them a great future. Gusev’s poem “Happiness” [“Schast'e”] begins with a description of how a coat of arms of a Polish nobleman was trampled. A Belarusian peasant tells the Soviet Russian soldier how terrible it had been to live in “gentlemen’s Poland” (panskaia Pol'sha ) and how happy he was to see his Soviet “brothers.” In the same issue of Pravda, Valentin Kataev’s “Travel Notes” [“Putevye zametki”] paints a horrible picture of life in the Second Polish Republic and describes the happy farmers welcoming Soviet soldiers. Kataev published five other eulogies of the invasion in Pravda. 46 Kataev also contributed to the promotion of ethnic animosities, by the use of the lie: he claimed in Pravda on 18 October that Jews had had no right to vote in “gentlemen’s Poland.” In point of fact, the various Jewish parties had consistently managed to elect representatives to the Sejm, and there had been a scattering of persons of Jewish background in other parties and groups. 47 On 22 October, Kataev contributed an article in which he described the bittersweet joy of the wife of a “communist who was shot by Poles” and now found herself a citizen of the Soviet Union. The colonialist proclivities of the Soviets manifested themselves also in an expert foregrounding of similar proclivities of the Poles, whose control of western Ukraine and western Belarus had been dynastically motivated but also classically colonialist. Under the

Second Polish Republic, ethnic Poles in Ukraine and Belarus had enjoyed linguistic and social privileges denied to Ukrainians and Belarusians. The Soviets took advantage of the resentments bred by this situation, and they used Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews as cat’s paws in paying whatever was due to the Poles, plus high interest. On 10 October, Literaturnaia gazeta published a letter in verse by a group of people identified as “Komsomol poets.” The letter was addressed to the workers of western Ukraine and western Belarus, and it spoke of two cities that had belonged to pre-war Poland, Vilnius (Wilno) and Przemysl. (Vilnius is presently the capital of Lithuania; Przemysl is located in southeastern Poland.) The article stated that the cities were, respectively, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The letter also spoke of the sufferings of Belarusians and Ukrainians under Polish rule and expressed joy that the Red Army had ended them. In Literaturnaia gazeta on 26 November, there appeared Evgenii Dolmatovskii’s poem “Midnight” [“Polnoch”’] describing an old family mansion previously owned by a Polish nobleman and now occupied by the Cossacks. Describing the act of expropriating a Polish family who had lived in that area for centuries, Dolmatovskii speaks longingly of Moscow in ways reminiscent of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. In the context of the poem about the expulsion and murder of ethnic Poles in Ukraine, the evocation of Moscow — its streets and boulevards, its young girls and passersby — creates an eerie impression. A similar ideological underpinning characterizes P. Kornienko’s article in the same issue of Literaturnaia gazeta. “The End of a Long-Lasting Tragedy” [“Konets mnogovekovoi tragedii”] says that Russians and Ukrainians belong to the same nation while the “Polish landowners” are enemies of both. The article contains quotations from an alleged History of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia, said to have been published in Lemberg, then under Austrian rule (in Polish Lwow and in Ukrainian Lviv) in 1879. This book allegedly divided all Slavs into ancient Poles, Poles, and

princes” (liakhy, poliaki i vladyki). Such allegations about the nastiness of Poles appropriating for themselves the early history of the Slavs could not but encourage violence against them in those turbulent times. In September and October 1939, there appeared in the Soviet Russian press an inordinate number of articles praising things Russian and reminding Russians of the Polish-Russian wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In articles, poems, and stories, suggestions were made that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus shared the same nationhood. On 10 October in Literaturnaia gazeta, V. Pertsov spoke of “the glorious military past of the Russian nation.” In the same weekly on 26 September, there appeared a poem by Piatro Glabka from eastern Belarus, which was part of the USSR. The poem suggests that Belarus and Russia had been separated by the wicked “Polish noblemen”: “We were born in the same country / But our fate was different / The entire world admired our growth / Whereas you suffered oppression all the time.” 4 * Mikhail Zhivov’s article “The Testimony of Polish Literature” [“Svidetel'skie pokazania pol’skoi literatury”] published in Literaturnaia gazeta on 10 October, paints a heart-rending picture of the working people in “noblemen’s Poland.” The article suggests that a small band of “Polish noblemen oppressed a huge mass of nonPolish urban and rural proletariat. In contradiction to this suggestion, the Soviet legal monthly Sovietskaia iustitsiia admitted in 1940 that it was necessary to find Polish-Russian translators for the courts of law located in cities and towns of western Belarus, because the local population spoke only Polish. 49 Maksim Ryl'skii published two anti-Polish poems, in Pravda (24 March 1940) and in Izvestiia (17 September 1940). In the second poem he reminisced about the first anniversary of Soviet rule over western Ukraine, calling it “great.” “The traces of [Polish] nobility are disappearing”; the “nobles” who “wielded the whip” are no more, declared Ryl'skii. When the winds of history changed direction,

however, Ryl'skii changed his tone as well, publishing a pro-Polish article on 13 August 1941 in Izvestiia. Stalin, frightened by Hitler’s attack, allowed Poles in the Gulag to reenlist in the Polish army. Ryl'skii duly intoned his praise for “the nation of Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Chopin and Copernicus,” urging the Poles to “erase the shame” of Nazi occupation by fighting bravely against it. Ryl'skii’s case demonstrates a range of manipulative possibilities that the empire had at its disposal with regard to the forcibly mute subaltern people. But in the meantime, it was open season on Poles. Meetings of the “intelligentsia” were organized in the occupied towns and villages of eastern Poland and western Belarus. Invariably, the intelligentsia declared itself in favor of the Soviets. Such was the case in Minsk and Bialystok ( Pravda, 1 October 1939), Vilnius ( Pravda, 2 October 1939), and Sionim ( Pravda, September 26, 193^). On 9 October, Pravda reported that 6,500 members of the intelligentsia who in “gentlemen’s Poland” were unemployed had now received jobs in the “Belarusian” city of Vilnius. The article states that “[n]oblemen’s Poland strangled Belarusian culture.” Similar sentiments were expressed in Pravda on 27 September 1939, in Mikhail Isakovskii’s poem “Sunrise” [“Na voskhode solntsa”]. Like Margarita Aliger and Valentin Kataev, Isakovskii was particularly active in vilifying things Polish at that time. He contributed other antiPolish poems to Pravda on 6 October and 5 November. On 15 October, Literaturnaia gazeta published his review of a book titled Brothers [ Brat'ia ], a Detizdat collection of what seems to have been anti-Polish poems for children. The promptness with which it was published and reviewed indicates that at least some of the material must have been prepared in advance of the Soviet invasion, then four weeks old. According to the reviewer, the book starts with a description of the Red Army soldiers destroying the boundary markers on the Polish-Soviet border. Isakovskii was also intent on confusing things Russian with things Ukrainian and Belarusian. In the poem “In Those Days” [“V eti dni”]

published in Pravda, he spoke of fighting the Poles unto death, and he remarked that the inhabitants of Ukraine and Belarus were “simple Russian boys” {prostye russkie rebiata) who loved their Russian homeland. The ambiguity of the word russkii (discussed in chapter 1) facilitated Isakovskii’s task. In the poem, a Belarusian peasant expresses his admiration for the Red Army and his appreciation of its disciplined and considerate approach to private property in western Belarus. He addresses the Red Army thus: “You have fought a life-and-death battle with the Polish nobles / But you have not fouled our wells / And did not even pick up one apple from our orchards, / Nor have you trampled upon a single vegetable bed.” 50 Alas, these words go beyond the limits of poetic license. Reports from villages and towns of western Belarus present a different picture. 51 In a poem published in Pravda on 10 October 1939, Semen Kirsanov charged that in “gentlemen's Poland ... the nobleman, the priest and the policeman made everyone work until they were totally exhausted." Kirsanov contributed similar views to Pravda on 15 November 1939. On 23 July 1940, he published in Pravda a poem describing how Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia voluntarily joined the Soviet Union, a country that the poet compared to a magnet ( strana magnit). The greatest magnet of all, said Kirsanov, was Stalin himself: various nations are irresistibly drawn to him. “The old world is getting a bit smaller while we are accepting Soviet Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia,” he asserted. This last phrase is a repetition of what Viacheslav Molotov said in a previously mentioned speech where he boasted that the old world has to “move over a bit ( potesnit'sia ) to make room for the expanding USSR. Aleksandr Twardovskii, who in the 1960s became one of the leading figures in the anti-Stalinist camp, wrote quite differently in the years of the Stalin-Hitler pact. On 10 October 1939, he published in Pravda a poem about the Red Army attacking Poland: “The Poles are fleeing from Red Army soldiers, from the song of free men, from the great truth.” On 21 October 1939, he published another poem in Pravda

titled “Word about the Land” [“Slovo o zemle”], in which the collective speaker expressed his hatred of the Polish party and called the Polish rule “illegal and accursed” ( nepravaia i prokliataia vlast'). Tvardovskii charged that “we worked for the accursed Polish noblemen, / and then had to beg them for a piece of bread.” The word pan and its derivatives are used seven times in this short poem, always in opposition to the “we,” or the narod, which by implication includes Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The use of the word zemlia (which can be translated as soil or land) in the title implies that the land is exclusively Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian, even though Poles too lived and labored in that multiethnic area. This word carries rich and positive connotations in Russian; thus “We did an honest thing-[W]e reached for our own land” (Na chestnoe delo my shli. . . . Gde vidano, dobrye liudi / Svoei chu^hat sia zemli) reinforces in readers a conviction that the Russians were right in waging an aggressive war. The list of writers who praised the Soviet invasion in articles, poems, and statements also includes M. Bronkov ( Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 September 1939), Aleksandr Korneichuk ( Pravda, 26 September 1939), Ianka Kupala (Pravda, 6 October 1939), Vasilii LebedevKumach and P. Lidov ( Pravda, 8 October 1939), P. Ponomarenko ( Pravda, 3 June 1940), K. Potapov (Pravda, 2 October 1939), Aleksandr^PrQkof'ev (Leningradskaia pravda, 22 September 19390, Il'ia Sel'vinskii (Pravda, 18 September 1939), A. Sitkovskii (Literaturnaia gazeta, 17 September 1939), E. Stepanov (Pravda, 4 October 1939), Nikolai Tikhonov (Pravda, 29 November 1939); Stepan Trudov and Vanda Vasilevskaia (Pravda, 27 October and 7 November 1939), Viktor Vinnikov (Pravda, 6 November 1939) and Iosif Utkin (Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 October 1939). The concatenation of anti-Polish articles in September-November 1939 in particular indicates a state-orchestrated effort to promote anti-Polish senti

ments so that the incorporation of new territories into the Soviet Union could proceed with support from the conquered populations. It also indicates that the Soviet Russian colonial desire, though a continuation of the old Russian desire for lands situated to the west of ethnic Russia, merged with communist ideology in such a way as to promote ethnic hatred to a much greater extent than had been the case in the tsarist empire. On 18 September Pravda published Foreign Minister Molotov’s radio speech declaring that “events have shown that the Polish state is unable to maintain itself.” The newspaper then quoted the note sent by the Soviet government to the Polish ambassador in Moscow announcing that the Soviet Union had decided “to take under its wing western Ukraine and western Belarus.” The takeover of what in effect became a Soviet Russian colony was thus supposedly acceptable under international law. In a speech on foreign policy before the Supreme Soviet, reprinted in full by Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, Molotov claimed that the population of the conquered territories warmly greeted the Red Army and that it was ready to throw away “the yoke of the pany.” 52 On 19 September in Pravda, Em. Iaroslavskii denounced the Polish government as brutal and oppressive. On the same day Pravda also featured articles under the following titles: “Celebrations in the Villages of Western Belarus,” “Our Brothers Will Now Live in One Big Family with Us,” “The Red Army Is Our Truest Defender,” and “The Soviet People and Their Glorious Red Army Fulfilled Their Sacred Duty.” On 25 September Pravda said that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and even Poles in the United States had rejoiced when they were told about the Red Army’s successes in eastern Poland. (The source of this information, said Pravda, was the Daily Worker.) On 15 October in Pravda, in “Agriculture in western Ukraine,” A. Kozlov claimed that “the arrival of the Red Army brought an end to nationalistic oppression and police violence; it offered the beginning of a new life in which there will be land, freedom, material welfare and the flowering of culture.” On 26 September, Boris Ponomarev spoke in Pravda of “the bloody terror practiced by the Polish gentry.”

On 10 October in the same paper Capt. A. Rezvykh described how he and his comrades had shot down a Polish airplane and defeated “the remnants of the Polish army.” Capitalizing on this massive effort to manufacture traditions, for nearly half a century Soviet historians spoke of Soviet aggression against Poland as “the freeing of western Ukraine and Belarus from the Polish yoke.” 53 The post-Soviet period brought only minor changes, sometimes no changes at all, to this imperial interpretation. Similarly, the war with Finland was said to have been caused by the Finnish “provocateurs,” and the annexations of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were described as the “return” of these territories to the Soviet Union. 54 Maj. Gen. Petr Grigorenko’s Memoirs shows that such views have been unquestioningly accepted even by socalled dissidents. Grigorenko devotes one page of his fivehundred page volume to the Soviet-Finnish war and the annexation of Finnish territory, and he says nothing of Soviet aggression against the Baltic countries and Romania. 55 Alfred Rambaud’s The Expansion of Russia: Problems of the East and Problems of the Far East (a popular French work on Russian history in the late nineteenth century) was based largely on Russian imperial historiography, bent on belittling those with whom Russia competed; 56 in the same way, some twentieth-century Western historians rely on Russian sources, with a nearly total disregard of works by historians based in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius, Kyiv, Tallin, or Riga: a classic “Orientalist” situation wherein an imperial power imposes on the world its own interpretation of its colonial possessions. In September and October 1939, Pravda and other newspapers carried numerous reports about supposedly spontaneous worker rallies in the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics asking for “liberation of our brothers from the oppression of the Polish overlords” and declaring support for “the wise decision of the Soviet government” to invade Poland. “There is great rejoicing in the cities and villages of the liberated territories,” said Pravda on 18 September. On 30 September Finansovaia gazeta reported that during such festivities

in the city of Bialystok, “a 20-year-old house painter Goldkor who had served time in the concentration camps of the Polish party . . . proposed that a telegram with thanks be sent to Comrade Stalin.” On 20 September Pravda described “a meeting of the intelligentsia” in the town of Slonim in western Belarus. In this town of under twenty thousand, 750 members of the local intelligentsia were said to have attended this meeting, among them “Drs. Weiss and Kovarskii,” who gave antiPolish speeches. On 13 October in Pravda, G. Ryklin ridiculed Tomasz Kapitulko, former head of a labor union in Bialystok, simply because Kapitulko was Polish. On 20 October in Pravda, A. Erlikh spoke of “western Belarus that had been tortured by Poles.” On 29 September 1939 Pravda published a testimonial by a Mr. Pragier about his stay in a “Polish concentration camp.” On 10 March 1940 Pravda published an article entitled “Letters from Western Parts of Ukraine and Belarus,” which stated that an unnamed American Jewish daily, published in New York in Yiddish, had issued a special supplement containing letters from Sovietoccupied Poland. An inhabitant of Grodno is said to have written the following to his brother in the United States: “Dear brother: Now we are free. We have jobs and try to forget the terrible life in Poland in the past.” Another man, who apparently had crossed over from Nazioccupied Poland, said, “Dear Jenny: You cannot imagine the goodness of the Soviet people. We came in rags, hungry, tired, and unhappy. They fed us and gave us water. The Soviet Union is truly the homeland of all the oppressed.” The prominence given by Soviet papers to Jewish names in these testimonials could hardly be accidental, and it could not have escaped the editors’ attention that in due time it would foster anti-Semitism among Poles. 57 The influence of such writings on American Jewish attitudes toward the Second Polish Republic should not be discounted. The divide et impera technique was also applied by fostering images of the past in such a way as to remind the Russian population of times when the Poles rather than the Russians had been ascendant. Mikhail Glinka s opera Life under the Tsars, staged in Moscow and widely reviewed, dealt dealt with the period in Russian history known as the Time of Troubles, when the Polish-Swedish crown prince

Wladyslaw Vasa claimed the Moscow throne. (In post-Soviet Russia, a provisional national anthem was taken from that opera, an indication that the Russian elites consider Russian-Polish relations to be of great psychological importance for the Russian self-image.) 58 In October and November 1939, Soviet periodicals featured reviews of Minin i Pozharskii, a film dealing with the Polish occupation of Moscow in 1610. On 26 October 1939, reviewer Georgii Shtorm thus described the Polish expedition to Moscow: “The Poles take away cattle, they slaughter the peasants, bum villages and towns. . . . [B]ees live in human skulls.” On the same day and in the same paper, P. Pavlenko denounced “Polish censorship” in Lvov (Lviv, Lwow). On 18 December 1939 in Pravda, A. Solodovnikov charged that minority artists were suppressed in “noblemen’s Poland.” On 3 November a Belarusian deputy to the Supreme Soviet, A. C. Malevich, denounced Poles in Belarus in words clearly calculated to stir up emotions: “Like black ravens, the Polish pany dug their sharp claws into our hearts.” On 13 November, when eastern Poland was already in Soviet hands, Pravda still spoke of “the yoke of noblemen’s Poland.” Soviet periodicals of the time abound in descriptions of Polish pany as degenerate and immoral. Reports from the various “liberated” towns described the alleged luxury in which these pany lived and reported that ordinary people had moved into their apartments. In October 1940 Pravda reported that in Lvov alone, more than two thousand families had been resettled into these luxurious apartments and houses. The fate of the former inhabitants of these houses can be gleaned from other sources. Thus a good number of major and minor Soviet Russian writers and politicians celebrated the invasion of Poland and presented it as a liberation of Ukrainians and Belarusians from the Polish yoke, even though, by any yardstick, the Soviet intervention actually worsened rather than improved the situation. The writers supported the invasion and, by implication, the Hitler-Stalin pact that had stipulated

it. This fact should be perhaps given more prominence in the evaluations of Soviet literature of the 1930s and 1940s. All too often, writers of that period are discussed as if they were merely subjected to the canons of socialist realism rather than as people whose conceptual worlds were deeply mired in the duplicity engendered by imperial aggressiveness. Writers like Aleksandr Tvardovskii, who assured his readers that the Soviets had done an honest thing in invading Poland, or Margarita Aliger, who described the Soviet share in the destruction of Poland as opening up a new epoch of history, were far from truthfulness. Writers such as these were not just servile to the regime; they dragged the Russian literary language to a level of mendacity from which it could not easily recover. The impact of these developments on Russian literature and on the concepts and ideas that prevail in Russian literary discussions—or, more broadly, on the “default mode” of public discourse in Russia— has not been extensively studied. The press was also used to misrepresent the attitude of the United States to the Soviet-Nazi pact. On 8 September 1939 Pravda reported that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had praised Germany for observing international law forbidding submarine attacks on merchant ships. On 31 August and 23 September 1939, Pravda reported that the New York stock market had gone up; on 17 September, the day of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the stock market rose in Japan, according to Pravda. Previously, information about stock market fluctuations had virtually never appeared in Pravda. On 19 September 1939 the paper reported that the Volkischer Beobachter had spoken favorably of the Soviet invasion of Poland. The article to which Pravda referred appeared on the same day in the Berlin edition of the Nazi paper; thus the editors of Pravda must have had access to it before it went to press. 59 On 30 September, Pravda featured a TASS interview with Joachim von Ribbentrop. The paper editorialized that “the German-Soviet friendship is now established forever. . . . Both parties hope that England and France will stop their absolutely pointless war against Germany. . . Should England and France fail to

do so, Germany and the Soviet Union will take the appropriate steps.” Hitler’s speeches were extensively quoted in the Soviet press in 1939-40, and the commentaries were favorable. On 2 September Pravda featured Hitler’s Reichstag speech holding that the Poles rather than Germans had started the war. On 21 September Pravda reprinted portions of Hitler’s 19 September Gdansk (Danzig) speech in which he lectured the Poles on democracy, and on 7 October the paper quoted another Reichstag speech in which Hitler declared the Polish state had no right to exist and had been built “on the bones and blood of Germans and Russians.” On 10 November 1939 Leningradskaia pravda featured a Hitler speech in Munich, and on 1 February 1940 Izvestiia reprinted portions of a speech by him on the Nazi rise to power. Viacheslav Molotov’s speech on Soviet foreign policy featured prominently in Pravda on 1 November 1939 defended Hitler and condemned the Western democracies. Molotov described England and France as aggressors and replaced the word fascism with Hitlerism. He said that “Hitler’s ideology can be accepted or rejected, this is a matter of political views. But . . . one cannot destroy an ideology by force. ... It is pointless and criminal to conduct a war to ‘destroy Hitlerism’ under the false slogan of a ‘fight for democracy’.” Molotov blamed the war on the colonial desire of the English and the French: these nations wanted to retain their colonial possessions, he argued, and that was why they had entered the war. Further, when the Polish state fell apart the Soviet government had “extended a helping hand to our brothers the Ukrainians and other brothers the Belarusians.” On 29 September 1939, Pravda featured an article on Nazi-Soviet friendship speaking of “the German-Soviet agreement about friendship and the border between the USSR and Germany . . . after disintegration of the former Polish state.” On 3 March 1940 in Pravda la. Viktorov said that the war “was concocted by the English and French imperialists who want to maintain their status in Europe.”

The anti-Polish campaign was accompanied by pro-Ukrainian and proBelarusian propaganda. Th.e.latter campaigns, however, were shorter than the first and seem to have been means of advancing anti-Polish feelings in western Belarus and western Ukraine rather than elements of a positive policy toward Ukrainians and Belarusians. The two campaigns began shortly after the MolotovRibbentrop pact was signed. In late August 1939 Literaturnaia gazeta featured articles promoting Ukrainian national pride and Ukrainian resentment against Poles. Some commemorated the Ukrainian Red Army commander Nikolai A. Shchors, who had fought against Semen Petlura, an ally of Pilsudski. It was announced that a Shchors museum would open in Kiev and that an ppera about him was being composed. On 19 September Pravda reported that three hundred employees of the Kiev state theater had welcomed “the freeing of their brothers from the oppression of Polish noblemen.” On 27 October Pravda featured an article about “the Ukrainian war of liberation against Poles in 1648-53.” On 15 January 1940 Literaturnaia gazeta devoted a special article to theatrical plays featuring Bohdan Khmel'nytsky, the leader of the Ukrainian rising. In September and October 1939, Pravda and other newspapers repeatedly published maps of partitioned Poland in which territories all the way to the Vistula River were labeled “western Ukraine” and “western Belarus.” There was a tradition in Russian historiography that Poland was a thorn in the Slavic side (because of its adherence to Roman Catholicism) and that Polish identity was nothing but a distortion of Belarusian and Ukrainian identity. Such views had been energetically promoted in the nineteenth century, when Poland had no independent political existence, and they significantly influenced Western opinions of Russia and Poland. 60 In 1939^-1, they resurfaced in Soviet Russian propaganda. Poems and stories in Ukrainian and Belarusian were featured in Pravda in September, October, and November 1939 (the only exceptions I know of to the rule that all articles in Pravda must be in

Russian). An alliance between the e^st Slavic nations of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus was, obviously, eagerly promoted. On 15 November in Literaturnaia gazeta, a Belarusian poem by Piatrus Brovko spoke of “the pan's whip” and “the pan's yoke” which no longer threatened Belarusians. The author declared that his people wanted to join “Red Moscow.” “Let the Polish pan perish” was the conclusion of the poem. “A Decade of Belarusian Art” opened in Moscow in September 1939. On 17 September 1940 Komsomol'skaia pravda published Iakov Khelemskii’s poem “In September” [“V sentiabre”], about a Belarusian orphan who was able to study in a Belarusian school after the Soviet takeover. Pravda and other Soviet papers featured articles about the Ukrainian poet Kotsiubinskii, “a friend of Gor'kii,” and the Ukrainian novelists Stefanuk and Martovich ( Pravda, 17 September and 4 October 1939). Within days of the invasion, twenty-eight editorial boards were sent from the Soviet Union to western Belarus to take over the offices of the local newspapers and journals. 61 These teams of Russianspeaking individuals could translate Russian press propaganda into local languages and help articulate views that would serve Moscow’s interests. At the same time, seven million new textbooks were printed for schools in western Ukraine. In Lvov alone, twelve thousand party activists were sent to the Russian-language schools to conduct reeducation {Pravda, 11 October and 4 December 1939). On 26 October Literaturnaia gazeta reported that Polish censorship in Lwov had made it impossible for honest social science textbooks to be sold in bookstores but that the Soviets had eliminated this obstacle and now such books were generally available. The same article also reported that a Russian bookstore with books for children had opened in that city. On 8 August 1940 Pravda reported that when Bialystok had been under Polish administration, the public library had had twenty-two thou sand Polish books; now there were sixty thousand books in “Russian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish and other languages.” It should be noted that at the time of the Soviet invasion, the Bialystok

province was inhabited by 1,004,370 Polish gentiles, 162,912 Polish Jews, and 119,392 Belarusians. The city of Bialystok was inhabited by 39,602 Jews, 35,832 Polish gentiles, and 1,358 people of other backgrounds. 62 On 6 February 1940 in Pravda, A. Avdeenko and S. Shukhmin wrote about Polish workers who had been elected to a factory soviet in Belarus and had then refused to hire new workers, because they did not want to hire Belarusians. The conclusion was that the Poles were nasty and nationalistic. On 19 February the same authors published an article denouncing “thousands of shopkeepers, the scum of old Lvov, who became feverish back marketers. . . . but not for long.” On 24 March Pravda described how “the liberated Belarusian nation celebrates its victory.” On 27 March “the feast day of the liberated nations” was celebrated in Lvov. “For 600 years,” said Pravda on 28 October 1939, “western Ukraine was moaning under the yoke of Polish nobles . . . and executioners,” implying that the time had come to settle accounts. In his book on the Soviet invasion, J. T. Gross has demonstrated that encouraging violence was a vital part of Soviet policy in the occupied territories and that it helped the Soviets to consolidate power in the region. 63 The Soviet press capitalized on the small number of Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Belarusian government-sponsored schools in Poland. The Soviets opened such schools shortly after they moved in, but, as the Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists soon found out, the schools were not part of a genuine attempt at Ukrainization. As soon as Polish rule had been definitely abolished and the Soviets began to feel secure, the emphasis changed to Russian nationalism. 64 In September, October, and November 1939, the Soviet Russianlanguage press encouraged Ukrainian and Belarusian assertiveness but also reported an increase in the publication and distribution of books and textbooks in Russian. Since virtually no Russians lived in the area, these books were obviously meant to increase the use of the metropolitan language among the non-Russian population, as well as to facilitate denationalization of the Belarusians and

Ukrainians. Furthermore, the Soviet Russian press repeatedly confused Russian with Ukrainian and Belarusian, sometimes suggesting that the latter two were dialects of Russian. In Pravda on 19 October, P. Lidov complained that in noblemen’s Poland, “the county of Bielsk Podlaski in the Bialystok province [predominantly Polish both then and at the turn of the twentieth century, and part of Poland before and after world War II] did not have .a single Russian or Belarusian school.” This complaint was legitimate regarding Belarusians, but hardly any Russians lived in the area. Pravda frequently mentioned a “blood brotherhood” between Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians but did not include the no less Slavic Poles. Obviously, “blood” mattered much less than imperial advantage to those who shaped the policies of the Soviet Russian state. Since Poles were oriented toward the West, they were excluded from the alleged Slavic “blood brotherhood.” Pravda complained that both the tsarist government and “noblemen’s Poland” had tried to separate the Russians from the Belarusians. On 16 November Pravda called for the “elimination of nationalistic contradictions purposely created by the policy of Polish noblemen.” In fact, both tsarist and Polish governments discouraged Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism. As they tried their own hand at imperialism, the Poles had tried to prevent Belarusian and Ukrainian separatism, and fostering nationalism among its minorities had not been part of their policy. The 1939 propaganda promoting the Russification of western Ukraine and western Belarus was still relatively mild, presumably because Ukrainian nationalism was not yet totally suppressed and the Polish minority was still entrenched. When V. Subotin discussed the restructuring of the judiciary in western Ukraine and western Belarus, he admitted that while the court proceedings had been conducted in Belarusian or Russian, in the cities Polish translators had had to be found. 65 On 26 October in Literaturnaia gazeta, P. Pavlenko announced that a Russian bookstore, particularly well supplied with children’s books, was opening in Lvov. On 8 August

1940 in Pravda, S. Tregub spoke of the “imperialistic Polish boot treading down Belarusians, Jews, and Russians,” and in the 16 April issue of Pravda P. Lidov spoke of “the Polish occupation of Grodno,” while on 17 September 1940 (the anniversary of the Soviet invasion) he called Grodno “an ancient Russian [russkii] city”—another deliberate contusion of Belarusian with Russian. L. Tolkunov expressed similar opinions in his article on the “liberation” of Grodno published in Pravda on 17 July 1944. On 28 November 1940, Mikhail Tardov published a Pravda article about the Russian Dramatic Theater in Kiev (Kyiv). Articles cautioning against Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural separateness began to appear in late 1939. On 1 December 1939 Stepan Tudor denounced Ukrainian independence in Pravda. He charged that Ukrainians used “physical and moral terrorism,” including assassination, job chicanery, and social boycotts, to advance their goals. They had collaborated with Polish police, persecuted the children of leftist leaders, and removed books of proletarian writers from schools and libraries. The center of these nationalistic activities was said to have been the publication Vestnik (note the Russian spelling), its young-reader supplement Nakanune, its Warsaw organ My, and its Catholic branch Zvony. A number of Ukrainian authors were said to have displayed nationalistic tendencies: Evgen Molaniuk, O. Olzhich, B. Kravstov, Iu. Lipov, Ju. Klen, L. Mosendz, B. Gomzin, I. Samchuk, Iu. Kosach, and P. Kedro. The Hoover Institution Archives contain hundreds of documents and testimonials of survivors indicating that the press propaganda against Poles had the desired effect. Some of these testimonials have been translated into English. One such document is a letter from a teenager named Marian Kundzicz, who had been deported to the Udmurt Autonomous Republic and forced to work at a job destructive to health. The letter said: “Some of the Russian boys were assigned to work as locksmiths and lathe operators, but they did not want to take me because I am a Pole. I work twelve hours a day immersed in water.” Another document said that “the Soviet

authorities . . . considered everything Polish as hostile.” 66 Bruno Bettelheim has written of that period, “Russia . . . made a de liberate and concentrated effort to destroy the existing fabric of Polish society and replace it with an alien one.” 67 Another propaganda campaign was conducted against the Finns before, during, and after the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939^10. Even before World War II, the Soviets likely considered a war against Finland as a policy option. Like Poland, Finland was a territory contiguous to Soviet Russia and thus a potential war bounty. The imperial tradition was strengthened by revolutionary zeal with which the Bolsheviks treated the eventual emergence of world communism. It is in this context that one should interpret Molotov’s remark that no government but the Soviet one would tolerate an independent Finland so near to Leningrad. 68 The popular press, however, was silent on the Finnish issue until hostilities broke out. Then a campaign of vilification was unleashed. On 28 November 1939, two days after the Soviets accused the Finnish government of shelling across the border, Pravda featured a cartoon showing a Finnish dog barking at the Soviet Union, with the late Polish president Ignacy Moscicki and foreign minister Jozef Beck observing the scene from the nether world. The caption read, “The war was started by the warmongering rulers of Finland who lost their heads. Let them remember that their fate will be as bitter as the fate of the miserable rulers of Poland.” A further note informed the reader that the remark had been taken from comments made at Moscow workers’ rallies. Elsewhere in that issue, Pravda threatened that “the Finnish adventureseekers . . . will be destroyed and squashed like so many insects.” Pravda also reported that “anger and hatred for the vile warmongers” filled the hearts of chocolate factory workers in Lvov and that the Kirov meat factory workers in Leningrad had demanded that “the Finnish brawlers be wiped off the surface of the earth.” Note the attempt to present the Soviet Union as the aggrieved party and Finland as the aggressor.

On 28 November Leningradskaia pravda featured twenty antiFinnish articles. The titles of the articles illustrate the emotional tone of the campaign: “The Criminal Plotters,” “There Will Be No Mercy,” “We Shall Answer with a Crushing Blow,” “The Warmongers Will Pay,” “Restrain the Provocateurs,” “We Shall Destroy the Enemy If He Does Not Come to His Senses,” and “Those Who Sow Wind Will Gather Storm.” On 30 November Finansovaia gazeta reported that two days earlier the Soviets had protested the alleged Finnish designs against Leningrad and had demanded that the Finns withdraw their army twenty to twenty-five kilometers from the border. When the Finns refused, they were attacked by the press. On 1 December Pravda accused them of planning to attack Leningrad. Among the epithets used to describe-the Finns in Literaturnaia gazeta were “reptiles,” “bandits,” and “warmongers.” “The fate of the Polish gentlemen should have taught them a lesson,” said Literaturnaia gazeta on 1 December 1939. “The Finnish pigs will not dare to stick their snouts into the Soviet garden,” declared Pravda on 30 November 1939. On 3 December, however, the latter paper announced “an inviolable friendship between the Soviet and Finnish nations”: Molotov and the Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen had agreed to form a Finnish People’s Republic. This agreement did not last, and “White Finland” was again vilified. On 26 December 1939 Finansovaia gazeta spoke of “the barbarism of the Mannerheim gang” who forced' farmers to relocate and acted as “an executioner of the working people.” (Mannerheim was a Finnish general and commander in chief.) On 30 January 1940 Izyestiia reported that in Finland “mass arrests and executions of peaceful citizens” were taking place. “Thousands of workers have been arrested, and hundreds were shot.... Mannerheim’s bandits burn homes, kill workers and terrorize the population in an incredible way,” claimed Izvestiia. (This echoes Georgii Shtorm’s description of Polish misdeeds in the seventeenth century. Apparently both writers studied the art of rhetoric from the same textbook.) On 23 February Pravda claimed that “ordinary Finns

surely remember the Finnish jails filled to capacity, the terror and the ferocious prison sentences under which all of Finland was moaning.” As had happened in the anti-Polish campaign, the Soviet Russian press went far beyond Marxist terminology to promote resentment against the Finns. Finns were presented as chauvinists and haters of everything Russian. 69 According to the pattern noted before, this meant that annexation of Finland to the Soviet empire was being seriously contemplated. After the hostilities ceased, the Russian-language press again crafted a perception that the Soviet cause had been just. The November 1940 Sovetskoe go\r sudarstvo i pravo presented the supposed legal causes for the war: the Finns had attacked the Soviets in November 1939, but, finding nothing but grief in their militaristic venture, they signed a peace treaty on 12 March 1940 and ceded to the Soviet Union parts of Finland adjacent to the Murmansk railway and to the outskirts of Leningrad. 70 On 21 May 1940 Komsomol'skaia pravda praised Toivo Antikainen, a candidate for the Supreme Soviet who had participated in “the defeat of the White Finnish bandits in 1920.” Flaving served time in the “torture chambers” of “bourgeois Finland,” Antikainen was now ready “to tell his electorate about the Finnish world of shortages and want.” On 22 May 1940, Komsomol'skaia pravda described a Valentin Purgin, a Hero of the Soviet Union, who had fought against the Finns in 193940. Purgin and his two companions had faced nine Finns, one of whom threw a grenade, killing six Finns and two Russians. Purgin survived, sharing his food and vodka with two wounded Finns. He tore clothes off the dead Finns to cover the wounds of the living, but he was afraid to fall asleep amidst the Finns, who were, after all, common bandits. Finally, he made a fire using vodka as a starter and was spotted by a Soviet airplane, which picked him up and also took care of the two wounded Finns. On 3 June 1940, Izvestiia denounced Finnish statistics concerning war losses. The Finns claimed they had lost 19,576 men; in fact, according to Izvestiia, they had lost seventy thousand, and fifteen thousand had died from wounds. Nearly half the Finnish army,

250,000, had been wounded, the paper claimed. The Finnish government was manufacturing “laughable lies.” The Izvestiia figures differ from those given by Molotov, who said that sixty thousand Finns had been killed. 71 On 16 June Pravda asserted that Finnish culture had not existed before the nineteenth century, and it blamed the Finnish bourgeoisie and intelligentsia for cultivating Finnish chauvinism and aversion to things Russian, a chauvinism that encouraged the Finns to wage a war they were to lose. As late as 18 Sep tember 1941, an Izvestiia author disputed an emigre Finnish author who had said that the Soviets bombed Finland gratuitously twentyfour hours after the German attack on the USSR. In Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, G. Kupriianov tried to separate the Finnish nation in Finland from the inhabitants of the Finnish territories annexed by the Soviet Union. He spoke of the “Karelo-Finnish nation” as opposed to the “White Finns” who inhabited Finland, and he recommended that both Finnish and Russian languages be taught in the Karelo-Finnish schools. 72 In annexed parts of Finland, a Russian-Finnish alliance at the expense of the economically weaker inhabitants of Karelia was attempted. Partiinoe stroitel'stvo first enjoined its readers to introduce Finnish and Russian into the schools and forget about the Karelians, but then a Karelo-Finnish republic was created, to be absorbed by the Russian republic in less than two decades. These divide-and-conquer policies were similar to those initiated in western Ukraine and western Belarus in 1939. The three remaining Baltic states were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Before the parliaments of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had expressed their desire to join the Soviet Union, a familiar spate of articles invoking ties with Russia appeared in the Russian press. 73 In a 2 October 1940 speech, Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Supreme Soviet, claimed that the nations of tsarist Russia were attracted to the Russians and had formed “organic ties” with them. Such claims continued to be made after World War II. 74 The Baltic nations were

not subjected to the kind of press propaganda as were the Slavic nations. Instead, significant percentages of the Baltic populations were simply deported, without major attempts to justify rhetorically the deportations, and the Russians moved in. The Soviets later made sure, however, when the Germans retreated, that the permanence of the Baltic annexations was reinforced in the press. In July 1944 articles stressed that the Red Army was about to liberate Soviet Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. “The liberation of Soviet Lithuania has begun,” announced Pravda on 10 July 1944. “The dawn of freedom over the Soviet Baltic republics,” Pravda rejoiced on 21 July 1944. When the Soviets annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940, Romanians were denounced in the Soviet press as suppressors of Ukrainians and Moldovans, and hostilities between the three groups were encouraged. Russians were said to have been an oppressed minority in Bessarabia. The expression Romanian boyars became a pejorative term, like Polish noblemen? 5 The Moldovans, however, presented a more difficult task, because they did not aspire to independence from Romania, as did the Ukrainians in Poland’s western Ukraine. On 1 July 1940 a Pravda' article said that the populations of Bessarabia and Bukovina spoke Russian and Ukrainian and hated Romanians. On 4 July 1940 Pravda published the testimonial of a soldier who had met a Russian inhabitant of Bukovina. The peasant said that the landowner had fled to Romania, leaving people like himself behind. The article thus suggested that the population of Bukovina was largely Russian or Ukrainian and that the Romanian boyars were alien to the region. Other articles described the cruelties and brutalities of the Romanian boyars. An 11 July Izvestiia editorial described the Moldovan nation as suffering under the boot of “Romanian boyars and gendarmes,” who viewed the Moldovan population as “despised staves.” On the same day, Pravda bemoaned “the barbarous governing methods of the Romanian occupiers.” Romanians were also subjected to

invective and verbal abuse. On 25 July 1940 Izvestiia ridiculed the facts that at the University of Kishinev (Chisinau) the departments of theology and agronomy were located in the same building, both had chapels, and the department of theology was bigger than the department of agronomy. On 13 August Pravda discussed Romania’s obligation to “return” southern Dobrudzha to Bulgaria. Six days later the paper informed its readers that a trade commissar had been sent to Bessarabia from Moscow, a sign that economic integration was about to begin. The anti-Romanian campaign tapered off at the end of July 1940. Afterward, every few weeks or so, an article would appear denouncing Romanian boyars and their exploitation of Moldovan peasants. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, attempts were made to separate the leaders from the people: “A thieving gang of Romanian muggers gave the country away to Hitler,” said Izvestiia on 15 August 1941. The hour of Moldovan nationalism was as remarkably short as the Ukrainian and Belarusian had been, and it was replaced by Russification. Even while Hie existence of the Moldovan nation was being proclaimed, the newspapers carried stories alleging that many Russians lived in Bessarabia. An Izvestiia article on 29 June 1940 said that “Bessarabia is an age-old Russian territory under Romanian occupation. ... It used to be a Russian guberniia. ... It was tied economically to the rest of Russia.” The article claimed that the 1897 census had showen 76 percent of the region’s population to be Ukrainian, Moldovan, or Russian. The exclusion of Romanians seems to have been the goal of these confused statistics. On 6 July Izvestiia announced that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences had organized a series of lectures about the history of the annexed region, another suggestion that east Slavs rather than Romanians should claim the region. In a 1941 Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo article, P. Tolstoi alleged that the Romanian boyars had attempted a “Romanization” of Bessarabian peasants much as the Polish noblemen had attempted to Polonize Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants. Tolstoi angrily used three words: romanizirovat',

polonizirovat', and opoliachit'. Note that he created two verbs signifying “to Polonize” while contenting himself with only one signifying “to Romanize,” in an article dealing with “Romanization.” 76 The anti-Romanian campaign ceased entirely before the war was over. On 14 September 1944 Pravda announced that two days earlier the Soviet Union, the United States, and Romania had signed a truce and that Romania had agreed to pay war reparations of three hundred thousand dollars to the Soviet Union. This “bitter lesson” should help the Romanians draw the appropriate conclusions about fighting against the Soviet Union, the paper said. Shortly afterwards, the Romanians changed sides in the war, and Romanian boyars were no longer mentioned. In fact, the redrawing of borders after World War II favored the Romanians as against the Hungarians in Transylvania. Bessarabia remained with the Soviets, and both Hungary and Romania became Soviet satellites. Thus from 1939 to 1941, nationalistic propaganda played a large role in Soviet policy. Soviet policy makers appealed to, and thus perpetuated, centuriesold nationalistic hatreds. The mediatory effort favored Russians at the expense of non-Russians and tried to sow nationalistic discord in the societies under Soviet control. These policies were clearly imperial in nature. Virtually every nonRussian national group within the post-World War II Soviet sphere of influence was denigrated by press propaganda at some point. Russian nationalism appears to have played a considerable role in legitimizing Soviet conquests and creating perceptions of unity in the societies that came under Soviet control during the years of the Soviet-Nazi pact. Despite the vision of the Soviet communist monolith promoted abroad, the party leaders used nationalistic manipulation to integrate the new territorial acquisitions. In doing so, they availed themselves of the colonial methods of the tsarist Russian empire, which they ostensibly had destroyed and dismantled.

The precise effect of the Russian propaganda effort in 1939—41 is difficult to assess in the absence of opinion polls and free presses. There is evidence, however, that the behavior of the Russianspeaking armies that invaded Eastern and Central Europe while chasing Nazi invaders back to Germany was not unrelated to the massive negative propaganda about the territories they crossed. The subsequent glorification in the Soviet Russian press and literature of the “great patriotic war” sealed these memories and assigned them a place in Russian imperial mythology. The relation of structural domination between the Russian language, subject, and center and the non-Russian periphery was thus confirmed one more time. While the cultural and political forces at work in the Russiandominated territories privileged metropolitan cultural interpretations over the peripheral ones, they did not supply tangible material perks to anyone except the elite. They did, however, prevent the Western world from appropriating Russia for its discourse without prior Russian participation and consent. The successful selfinterpretation in 1939-41 was submitted to and largely internalized by Western historians and critics. WRITING HISTORY IN POSTCOMMUNIST RUSSIA While postcolonial discourse is based on a significant modification, if not a conscious rejection, of Enlightenment epistemology, Russian intellectual discourse has not developed an awareness of its own ambiguous epistemological base, let alone considered its modification. It can never be stressed strongly enough that of all the areas of'cultural activity in Russia, philosophy has been the weakest. Neither Oriental nor Western ways of knowing have made much headway in Russian theorizing; indeed, systematic and disciplined theorizing has been largely absent. While Western technology had already been adopted by the Russian military during the reign of Peter the Great and, occasionally, has been improved upon, philosophy has largely been limited to occasional appearances of theorizing in belles letters (as in Dostoevskii) and in religious works.

The lacunae were enlarged under the Soviets, owing to the primitive version of Marxism propagated in such works as Nikolai Bukharin’s The Theory of Historical Materialism (1921) or History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bol'shevik): A Short Course (1938), said to have been written by Stalin. The conceptual poverty of these widely read and discussed works delayed the development of what may be called the epistemological identity of the Russians. In Western constructions of Russian identity, these problems have been largely ignored. In Western discourse about Russia, the Hermitage Museum, the Peterhof, Tolstoi, and Dostoevskii have been taken as guarantors of depth in an entire range of humanistic endeavor. It is within the framework of this absence of epistemological theorizing that the post-Soviet Russian approaches to history are best considered. I have perused a number of history textbooks written after the unsuccessful antiGorbachev putsch in 1991. They range from those intended for the institutions of higher learning to those written for high school students. At first look, these texts look encouraging. The tone is less aggressive than in Soviet times. The Soviet jargon is almost completely gone, the Marxist vocabulary has melted, and the formatting is new and interesting. The textbooks eschew the narrative dullness characteristic of Soviet texts. 77 In contrast to the pronouncements of Russian politicians, they display much liberalism concerning the then-projected enlargement of NATO. Here, however, the positives end. Perhaps the most striking feature of these texts is their lack of interest in the history of ideas. The texts show no understanding of the process of intellectual development in Europe, let alone in other parts of the world: how European views on society, individual liberty, and the human search for meaning progressed through history and how they differed from the views developed elsewhere. This does not mean that these texts consciously eschew Eurocentrism; they stress their European allegiance. However, the textbook writers are simply unaware of the

epistemological options that the major European philosophers have pondered and by which they have been influenced. The Russian authors have a strikingly static view of the world and see history in terms of Lenin s kto kogo or as a struggle of one strongman against another, one army against another, with no mediation of ideas, no complex encodings of values, and little realization of the key problem of modernity, namely, the relationship between Self and Other. They seem unaware of the many theories of history that have percolated through Western and nonwestem historical writings. What matters in history, the textbooks suggest, is military strength and technological progress. The only intellectual idea that is brought up repeatedly is the Russian devotion to rodina; the textbooks offer a carbon copy of Raisa Gorbacheva’s advice to Wellesley students mentioned in chapter 5, namely, that the highest duty is fidelity to the fatherland/motherland. If imperialism is mentioned, it appears in the old Soviet Marxist garb which exonerates Russia of imperialistic leanings. No realization of Russia’s colonial cupidity is anywhere in evidence. Nor are the authors of these textbooks familiar with deconstructive critiques or a possibility of regrounding their world view in the earlier rationalism that harks back to medieval Christianity rather than to Enlightenment rationality. The idea of contract, so crucial to capitalism, is nowhere discussed, nor are the agreements between states treated as contracts. The difference between European feudalism, itself a kind of contract between the estates, and the Russian system of ownership by the state is nowhere explained. It is implied that there was no fundamental difference between Muscovite autocracy and Western absolutism, and that Western countries developed in a pretty much the same way as Russia, except that they were perhaps more advanced in passing from feudalism to capitalism and in implementing capitalist reforms. While the history of ideas gets no treatment at all, much attention is paid to military engagements and the development of weapons. Russian textbooks tend to pay exorbitant attention to the technical side of warfare. In textbooks that contain exercises and tests,

students are repeatedly quizzed on the details of this development. In the question-and-answer section of one high school textbook, the author asks students the following questions: “How does the manufacturing of bells and cannons differ? What additional metallurgical skills are required for the making of cannons, as opposed to bells? Where did Russians obtain the metals necessary for the making of cannons and bells? When did Russians first start using firearms, how did they call the soldiers who used firearms, what how did the first firearms differ from contemporary weapons?” Or: “Name the first battle that was won owing to the use of cannons. Name the first battle that was won because of the use of firearms.” 78 “Where and why was the Russian navy created?” 79 “What was the difference between the Russian riflemen and the ‘foreign formation’ soldiers in the 1670s?” These are questions directed at ordinary high school students, not at cadets at a military academy. They raise consciousness of the role that the military played in Russian affairs, and thus they work toward a reinforcement of that role. 80 A related problem is the history of Russia in the context of its neighbors’ histories. Again, no sensitivity is displayed regarding the competing histories of the region written by Russia’s neighbors. There is no recognition of nationality problems within the “Russian” Federation, either. With one exception, all the textbooks surveyed assert that the history of Russia began in Kiev and has been continuous ever since. This view is, of course, a legitimate option; however, beginning in the 1990s such statements had to be qualified by an acknowledgement of an independent Ukraine or a mention that Ukraine claims the same beginnings. Instead, one finds an adherence to the old ideological scheme, according to which Russia’s size and heterogeneity need no further elaboration. In one textbook, the annexation of Ukraine by Muscovy in 1649 is described as “reunification” ( vossoedinenie ) of Ukraine with Russia, even though Muscovy and Ukraine had never before been united.

The unwillingness to addres£ the issue of Ukrainian statehood is one instance of the general unwillingness of the authors to introduce corrections to a view of Russian history that ignores the Other or presents him or her as an enemy. The authors obviously prefer to remain safely anchored in the harbor of concepts generated by tsarist and Soviet historians, ignoring the postcolonial states that emerged from the former Soviet sphere of influence. Within that context, one notes the differences between the descriptions of annexations of territory by Russia and those by other countries, or declarations of independence by nations 188 Imperial Knowledge that at some point were part of the Russian empire. The terminology is dramatically different. Terms such as “tom away "'(ottorgnutyi) are used when describing Russian losses; 82 “return” ( vozvrashchenie ) or “opening to the Baltic” are employed for Russian gains. One textbook speaks of the Lithuanian-Muscovite war launched by Ivan the Terrible as a war for “the return of the ancient Belarusian lands, for a window to the Baltic.” 83 By means of ambiguous usage, a perception is created that the territory of the Baltic states was inhabited, in some unspecified period of history, by Slavic tribes and that Belarus was, at some unspecified time in the past, a part of Muscovite Russia. Thus Pushkin’s expression “let us carve off ( vyrubit ') a window to Europe” through Finnish territory becomes “a window to Europe within the indigenous Slavic territory that was returned to us.” The USSR is viewed in terms of what it did, or did not do, for Russian interests, to the exclusion of non-Russian Soviet peoples. Gone is the view that the USSR was a new kind of state meant to dissolve national differences. The postSoviet textbooks view it rather as a new lease on life for the Russian Empire. One author points out that the territory of the USSR coincided “with the lands of the [former] Russian Empire” and goes on to reassert, in conformity with the Soviet national anthem discussed in chapter 2, that [the USSR]

“was created by the Great Russian people” ( velikorusskii narod). M One of the texts is a collection of documents that make no distinction between the concepts of “Russia” and “the USSR,” and assert that the USSR was the same as “Soviet Russia” (Sovetskaia Rossiia ). 85 While this was the way it worked in practice, the official view was that the USSR was a union of nations. The colonialist nature of that state is thus unwittingly confirmed. The conflicts between the nations of the Caucasus are blamed exclusively on their direct participants, with no mention of the imperial center. Armenia and Azerbaijan turn out to be the sole culprits in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, even though it was Moscow that gave the Armenian-populated NagornoKarabakh to Azerbaijan, thus creating conditions for conflict. The declaration of independence by the leaders of the Baltic republics is lamented as a “constitutional crisis that the central authorities failed to resolve. There is no mention of the illegality, under international law, of the 1940 annexations of the three Baltic republics, even though such an admission might have been expected in the postSoviet period. The military interventions in Tbilisi in 1989, Baku in 1990, and Vilnius and Riga in 1991 are blamed on the ineptness of the Soviet authorities, as is the 1991 attempted putsch in Moscow. 86 The issue of liberty does not enter the picture. These interpretations of Soviet provenance do not predispose Russian students to treat Latvians or Estonians with much sympathy or to develop an understanding of what the will of the people is all about. No textbook makes an effort to lay out, if only in order to rebut, the point of view of the national groups who have distanced themselves from Moscow or expressed a wish to do so. One textbook still speaks. Soviet-fashion, of “Russian” nationalities ( rossiiskie natsional nosti): a Soviet rhetorical invention that steers the reader toward an opinion that only nations are appropriate candidates for independent statehood, whereas nationalities are to remain part of the “Russian” Federation. The adage that “the Russian Federation has many nationalities” was a set expression under the Soviets, and reinforcing this view in

changed circumstances does not advance understanding between the Russian metropolis and the periphery. The unwillingness to revise interpretations of history invented in the USSR is particularly evident in regard to the twentieth century. Only the letter, not the spirit, of the Stalin-Hitler pact is mentioned. The pact made violence and war inevitable, since it could have been expected that dividing sovereign nations between the USSR and Germany would cause military action and resistance. But the aggression against the Baltic states in 1939 is described in the following way: “In Fall 1939, the USSR and the Baltic countries signed an agreement about mutual assistance, and in order to render it, the Red Army entered these states.” 87 German aggression against Poland in September 1939 is dissociated from Soviet aggression against Poland the same month. The latter is explained in a way similar to that of Viacheslav Molotov in his radio address on 17 September 1939, or the day the Soviets invaded: “We took under our care the lives and property of the inhabitants of western Belarus and western Ukraine.” 88 Other textbooks justify the post-World War II Yalta agreement by saying that the West “gave away” to Russia that part of Europe which it did not regard as its own. 89 In another textbook, the joint Soviet-Nazi aggression against Poland is described as a “return [to the Russian fold] of the western provinces of the former Russian Empire.” 90 The Soviet-Nazi agreement of 28 September 1939, of which the centerpiece was the elimination of the Polish state, is mentioned in the context of “restoring peace and order” in the territories of the former Polish state.” The Katyn crime is nowhere acknowledged. The first two years of war are skimmed over, as if the creation or enlargement at that time of seven Soviet union republics was irrelevant to what happened in World War II. The war is seen exclusively in terms of what happened on the eastern front after the German attack on 24 June 1941. An impression is created that the USSR won the war single-handedly, that there was no significant western front, and that all important battles took place on ethnically Russian territory.

Some English-language histories of Russia reflect a strikingly similar amnesia concerning the World War II period. The years 1939-41 are barely mentioned in such books. George Vernadsky’s A History of Russia (1961) describes Soviet aggression against Poland as a “rectification of the western frontier.’’According to Vernadsky, the annexation of the Baltic republics was a result of “diplomatic moves.” Vernadsky describes the aggression against Romania in the following way: “[A]n ultimatum was delivered to the Romanian government, and upon its expiration Soviet troops occupied Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Si™' larly, Nicholas V. Riasanovslcy’s A History of Russia asserts that that the StalinHitler pact was one of “strict neutrality” and tries to defend the Bolsheviks by saying that they “hated” the Nazis and “no illusions” as to the merits of the agreement. 92 Yet as demonstrated in the second section of this chapter, the Soviet press showed no foresight as to the eventual realignment of alliances m World War II. Riasanovsky says that Hitler “attacked Poland,” whereas the Red Army merely “occupied eastern Poland.” Likewise, he says that the Soviet Union “utilized its agreement with Germany to obtain from Roumama, by means of an ultimatum, the disputed [italics added] region of Bessarabia as well as northern Bukovina.” Riasanovsky’s History repeats almost verbatim the point of view of the articles that appeared on 29 June 1940 and later in the Soviet Russian press. These articles claimed that following a Soviet demand to which the Romanian government had consented, the Red Army had entered Kishinev, Chernovtsy, and Akkerman. The Romanian army fled, the Romanian boyars and capitalists with it. The newspapers further said that Ukrainians and Moldovans had rejoiced over the arrival of the Red Army, while Romanians ran away. Other American historians likewise trivialize the massive imperial drive of 1939—41. In St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814—1974 (1974), Barbara Jelavich devotes one paragraph to the secret agreements of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Jelavich’s book displays a typical lack of recognition of the role

played by colonialism in Eastern and Central Europe. A lengthy search (unaided by the appropriately lengthy index) in the sevenhundred-page-long Russia and the Soviet Union: A Modern History (1968) by W. B. Walsh yields two pages about the pact and no mention of the national questions involved. 93 Such derivative summaries as Edward Acton’s Russia, a book that is virtually free of an awareness of primary sources, perpetuate these omissions. 94 While James H. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe is admirable in% many ways, it has not corrected them either. 95 William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich devotes more attention to the Pact and to the way it affected the nations of Central and Eastern Europe than any history of Russia / know of, in English or in Russian. 96 It appears that the Soviet-Nazi friendship period has been deliberately excised from Russian historical memory and that Western historians have applied a sealing solution to this version of events. The postcommunist Russian history textbooks perpetuate this major recasting of history. In the textbooks, the neighbors whom the empire coveted are remarkable mainly for their absence. Hetman Stefan Zoikiewski’s trek to Moscow in 1610 and his negotiations with the boyars that prompted it are dismissed as an unsuccessful venture of the “Polish hooligans” {pol'skie avantiuristy). The partitions of Poland are trivialized out of existence, while Catherine’s role in engineering them remains unmentioned. One textbook maintains that in the “socalled” (tak nazyvaemye ) partitions of Poland, Russia merely “liberate^]” (osvobozhdaet) the ancestors of present-day Ukrainians and Belarusians. 97 Quoting a Politburo document, another textbook says that “one has to activate the propaganda in such a way as to make every Polish person know how dependent their country is on Soviet help and support.” 98 This statement is quoted not to illustrate the detailed nature of Soviet propaganda but to argue that the Polish satellite was indeed so dependent and that its existence outside the Russian sphere of influence should not have been permitted. The military campaigns against Russia’s neighbors are scaled down to minuscule proportions. The textbooks do not outline the historical

events by means of which the state of Muscovy became the Russian Empire. The systematic policy of colonial enrichment, so freely spoken of in British historical writings, is never discussed in Russian textbooks. The textbooks apparently assume that the con sciousness of Russian students need not be raised concerning the methods and purposes of Russia’s territorial expansion. Russian foreign policy of the 1990s is discussed in several textbooks, but always in a fragmentary way, as if to prevent the students from critically assessing the macropolitical picture. President Yeltsin’s ambiguous statement about the possibility of returning the Kurile Islands to Japan is assessed as a mistake, and the negative reaction of Russian society to it is taken as a matter of course. No opinion polls are quoted. The very fact that the Kuriles issue had been discussed by the Russian political establishment is said to be a “yielding to foreign pressure” ( ustupchivost ')." Interestingly, a poll conducted jointly by Russia’s ITARTASS agency and Japan’s Asahi Shimbun showed that while most Russians (55 percent) were opposed to any concessions to the Japanese concerning the Kurile Islands, the percentage of those opposed decreased the nearer one came to Japan. 100 The war with Chechnya in 1994—96 is presented in the language of a law-andorder country (Russia) battling bandits who threaten public safety. Russia merely answered the provocations of the Chechen criminals, says one text. 101 The Chechen attempt to become independent is said to have been an “outburst of nationalistic separatism.” 102 The Chechen mafia is vaguely blamed, and President Dzhokhar Dudaev is said to have “legalized the stealing of non-Chechen property by the fighters” ( boeviki ) and to have sanctioned a “genocide of the Russian population.” The textbooks express concern about the need to furnish a new state ideology for the “Russian” ( rossiiskie ) people. It is taken for granted that the creation of such an ideology is the business of the state. As one textbook says, “A society cannot exist without an ideology. ... In 1996, President Yeltsin spoke of the necessity of

articulating a new all-Russian ideology that would unite all inhabitants of the Russian Federation. He set up a special commission to work on this problem. . . . Culture must be both the leading force and the centerpiece of such a national idea, and the support of the state for it is simply essential.” 103 The subsequent creation of a government-controlled TV channel was a follow-up to these goals. A Moscow-based national channel called “Culture” was created in 1997 by a decree of President Yeltsin. As Brian Whitmore put it, “Yeltsin’s decree [about the creation of the channel] appears to be a part of a maneuver by which the Kremlin is attempting to reassert control over all of Russia’s national television stations.” 104 It may appear that such a channel would merely correspond to American public TV channel. Upon a closer look, important differences become apparent,,at least at the initial stage. First, Yeltsin personally appointed its director/Mikhail Shvidkoi. 105 Second, the channel was to be funded directly by the state, thus precluding competing influences. President Yeltsin has said he wants the new channel “to extend the scope of school programmes and make them more interesting, to explain to young people how to succeed in life and to show old people the songs, shows and films of their youth [italics added]. , A related development is the postcommunist Russian state s attempt to exert an ideological influence on the Russophone populations of neighboring coun tries. In October 1997, Moscow’s mayor, Yurii Luzhkov, said that the city government was planning to send textbooks to Russianlanguage schools in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and to the city of Sevastopol in Ukraine. 106 In a volume titled The Russian Flowers of Evil [Russkie tsvety zla\ (1997) edited by Viktor Erofeev, several contemporary authors assert that the former Russian empire is a patrimony of all

the Russians and that lost territories should be regained. 107 Such texts and policies reinforce among Russians the feeling of injury that has to be corrected. The textbooks reviewed here are not belligerent in the sense in which Limonov has been, but they do little to question the received ideas of the Soviet past or to mollify contemporary expressions of Russian colonial desire. Thus one is obliged to conclude that at least some of the Russian history textbooks published in the 1990s and approved by the state for use in schools and universities (all of those surveyed here have been so approved) foster views and interpretations that may become obstacles to Russia’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, as well as obstacles to the internal stability of the Russian Federation. The authors of the textbooks have not reconciled themselves to the loss of the “inner empire.” They seem unable to grant to Russia’s neighbors—Ukrainians, Balts, Central Asians, Georgians, Chechens, and others — th^ right to view history in their own way and to proclaim their separate identities. The seizure of the Kurile Islands at the end of World War II continues to be perceived as legitimate. There is a longing for a reunification of Ukraine and Russia. Interestingly, however, the integration of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO is taken as a fait accompli even though, at the time these textbooks were written, such an outcome was at most one option among many. The idea that the Baltic states or even members of the CIS would also join is presented as a possibility, but the alarmist tone is remarkably missing, in contrast to governmental pronouncements. The authors of the textbooks admit that NATO is a means of a protection from Russia, that it does not plan to invade Russia. The only real negative for Russia that is mentioned is the loss of the arms market in Central Europe. In a nationwide survey of six thousand Russians conducted by the Betaneli sociological institute on 11-14 August 1997, only 16 percent said they had supported Yeltsin and the defenders of the Russian parliament during the 1991 attempted putsch, compared with 21 percent who said they sympathized with the putschists. 108 In 1991, the hardships of economic reform were not yet in sight, yet only ten

thousand Muscovites, or one-tenth of 1 percent of the inhabitants of Moscow, showed up to support Yeltsin at the rally when he mounted a tank and gave a rousing speech. By all indications, the fall of the USSR continues to be viewed as a defeat for Russia.Tn October 1997, the Voronezh Oblast' Duma recommended that teachers not use a textbook on European history by a Saratov University professor, Aleksandr Kreder, and financed by George Soros’s Cultural Initiative Foundation. The deputies charged that the book belittled and distorted Russian history. 109 The authority of past interpretations is likely to remain in evidence for a long time, even though there exists in Russia a minority of intellectuals ready to give Russian imperial history a second look. 110 At the turn of the twenty-first century, post-Soviet Russian writings continue to display a remarkable lack of sensitivity to the construction of the image of the Other. The Other is either wicked and an enemy of Russia, or absent and plays no role on history’s stage. NOTES 1. John H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 41. 2. E. M. Thompson, “V. B. Shklovskii and the Russian Intellectual Tradition,” in Arnold McMillin, ed., Aspects of Russian and Czech Literature: Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989), 11-21. 3. L. I. Timofeev, Osnovy teorii literatury (Moscow, 1974), 737. 4. Alex de Jonge, Fire and Water: A Life of Peter the Great (New York: Coward McCann, 1980), 99-101, 242. 5. V. B. Shklovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1974), 737-8. 6. Ibid., 688.

7. Annette Gordon-Reed, “Why Jefferson Scholars Were the Last to Know,” Houston Chronicle, 4 November 1998. 8. “Drevnerusskii smekh otnositsia po svoemu tipu k smekhu srednevekovomu.” D. S. Likhachev, “Smekhovoi mir” drevnei Rusi (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 9. 9. “Esli kharakterizovat' drevnerusskuiu literaturu, pol'zuias' metodom ‘bol'shikh skobok’, to sleduet priznat', chto one prinadlezhala po svoei strukture k tipy literatur srednevekovykh (svoistvennykh ran'she i literaturam Zapada.” D. S. Likhachev, Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 16. 10. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 199. 11. Will Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950), 929. 12. Ernst R. Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1948), 106. 13. Immanuel Kant, Werke, vol. 5 (Wiesbaden: Im Insel Verlag, 1957), 437-8. 14. “A priamaia doroga do togo vesel'ia ot Krakova do Arshavy i na Mozovshu, a ottuda na Rigu i Livliand, ottuda na Kiev i na Podoletsk, ottuda na Stekolniui i na Korelu, ottuda na Iur'ev i k o Bresti, ottuda k Bykhovu i v Chernigov, v Pereiaslavl' i v Cherkasskoy, v Chigirin i Kafimskoy. A kogo perevezut Dunai, tot domoi ne dumai.” Russkaia demokraticheskaia satira XVII veka, edited by V. P. AdrianovaPeretts (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 33. 15. Wiktor Jakubowski, “Pismiennictwo zjednoczonego paristwa moskiewskiego,” Literatura rosyjska, vol. 1, edited by M. Jakobiec (Warsaw: PWN, 1970), 140.

16. Anthony Stokes, “Literajure^of the Seventeenth Century,” in John Fennell and Anthony Stokes, eds., Early Russian Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 258. 17. Richard Pipes, “Diplomacy and Culture: Negotiation Styles,” in Arms Control: Myth versus Reality, edited by Richard F. Staar (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 156. 18. Iurii Lotman, “O dvukh tipakh orientirovannosti kul'tury,” in Stati'i po tipologii kul'tury (Tartu: Univ. of Tartu Press, 1970), 86-98. 19. I would like to thank Professor F. J. Thomson of the University of Antwerp for pointing this out to me. 20. “The Account of George Turberville,” in Rude and Barbarous Kingdom, edited by L. E. Berry and R. O. Crummey (Madison: Univ.'of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 76. 21. Domostroi (Moscow: 1882). Quoted from Bradda Books Reprints (1971), 57-62,

68 . 22. Curtius, 421-23. 23. A. M. Skabichevskii, “Asketicheskie nedugi v nashei sovremennoi peredovoi intelligentsii,” Russkaia mysl' 21 (OctoberNovember 1900), 24. 24. Stoglav, edited by D. E. Kozhanchikov (St. Petersburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1863), 135-6. 25. Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: A History of the “Skomorokhi” (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 45-80. 26. N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarsva rossiiskogo, vol. 9 (St. Petersburg: Evdokhimov, 1892. Reprinted by Mouton (The Hague, 1969), 105. 27. Adam Ulam, The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 138; Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965); and Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power (New York: Summit, 1986). Hannah Arendt was the first to apply the totalitarian model to the Soviet experience, whereas the historicist model has generally been used by Marxists and post-Hegelians. For a discussion of these two models, see John Armstrong, “Comments on Professor Dallin’s ‘Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR’,” Slavic Review 32 (Fall 1973), 577-87. For allegations of blindness by researchers to the problems of nationalism in the Soviet Union, see Alexander J. Motyl’s “'Sovietology in One Country' or Comparative Nationality Studies?” Slavic Review 48 (Spring 1989), 83-88. 28. Alexander Dallin, “Soviet Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics: A Framework for analysis,” in The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy,

edited by Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr. (New York: Aldine-Atherton, 1971), 36—49; Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 65-6, 155-6. For older yet still well entrenched views of Russian foreign affairs, see George Kennan, Russia and the West (New York: Mentor, 1960), and Barrington Moore Jr., Terror and Progress in the USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), where the discussion of problems related to Soviet nationalities is limited to a consideration of the formation of cliques among intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds, with total disregard of the problems of colonialism. A similar approach prevails in David Lane, Politics and Society in the USSR, 2d ed. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979). 29. Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 363. 30. Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988). 31. The “legal” documents justifying these annexations can be found in “Zakony, priniatye Verkhovnym Sovetom SSSR,” Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, no. 14 (July 1940), 39—41. 32. “Vneshniaia politika Sovetskogo Soiuza,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 8-9, no. 4 (1940). 33. Izvestiia, 11 January 1940, on changing the Kyrgyz alphabet from Arabic to Cyrillic; Pravda, 29 March 1940, on changing the Tatar alphabet from Latin to Cyrillic. 34. Only a portion of Finland was incorporated into the Soviet Union following the Soviet-Finnish war. 35. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1974), 72, 369.

36. After the annexations, one-third of the Soviet population did not speak Russian well enough to be influenced by Russian-language publications. This segment of society was approached by newspapers in other languages that took their clues from the Russianlanguage press. See the discussion of Czerwony Sztandar in Gross, xx, 66, 75, 85, 189, 191, 217. Also Adam Ulam, “Russian Nationalism,” in The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy, edited by Seweryn Bialer (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981), 3-17. 37. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 224, 51-69. 38. Gross, 35. 39. Michal Heller, “Polskie pany,” Kultura, no. 421 (October 1982). 40. Jonathan Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 197-8. 41. Ia. Viktorov, “Mezhdunarodnyi obzor Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, 1 January 1939, 62. 42. “Pol'skoe gosudarstvo, postroennoe na podavlenii, ugnetenii i tiazheloi ekspluatatsii natsional'nykh men'shinstv, na nasil'stvennom opoliachenii ukrainskogo i belorusskogo naseleniia, na bezzastenchivom unichtozhenii vsei ikh kul'turnoi zhizni . . . podverglos' pri pervom zhe serioznom ispytanii voennomu razgromu. . . . My privetstvuem liubimuiu Krasnuiu Armiiu, zashchitnitsu ugnetennykh, slavu i gordost' sovetskogo naroda . . . vse svobodnye, ravnopravnye, schastlivye narody Sovetskogo Soiuza splocheny vokrug pravitel'stva i Partii Lenina-Stalina.” Pravda, 18 September 1939. 43. Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 September 1939.

44. Originally published in Pravda on 17 September 1939. E. M. Thompson, ed., The Search for Self-Definition in Russian Literature (Houston, TX: Rice Univ. Press, 1991), 203-4. 45. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 197-206. 46. Pravda, 26 September and 6,18, 22, and 29 October 1939. 47. The History of Poland since 1863, edited by R. F. Leslie (London and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 153—4, 168-9, 1756, 198. 48. “Nas kraina odna porodila / Da neravnoe schast'e dala / My rosli vsemu svetu na divo / Vas nevolia vezde steregla.” 49. Sovietskaia iustitsiia, no. 7 (1940), 23. 50. “So shliakhtoiu vy na smert' voevali / A nam ne zamutili i vody / Ni iabloka ni razu ne sorvali, / Ne zatoptali ni odnoi griady.” 51. The Anders Archive, the Mikolajczyk Archive, and Poland. Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Archive at the Hoover Institution. 52. V. Molotov, “O vneshnei politike Sovetskogo Soiuza,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 5 (1939), 6. 53. F. G. Zuev et al., Istoriia Pol'shi, 2 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1958), 456-7. 54. M. P. Kim, ed., Istoriia SSSR: Epokha sotsializma (Moscow, 1958), 534-42. 55. P. Grigorenko, Memoirs, translated by Thomas Whitney (New York: Norton, 1982), 92. 56. Alfred Rambaud, The Expansion of Russia: Problems of the East and Problems of the Far East. Burlington, VT: The Intfcrnational Monthly, 1900; also Piotr Wilczek, “Jesuits in Poland according to' A. "F. Pollard,” Sarmatian Review, 19, no. 1 (January 1999), 593-6.

57. For corroboration of this conclusion, see Gross, 29, 32-33. 58. On 10 March 1999, the Russian Duma voted 307-35 in favor of reintroducing the tune of the Soviet anthem to replace the Glinka version. As reported by the Agence France-Presse on the same day, the Soviet text was to be replaced by new lyrics. Two more votes are required to finalize a return to the Soviet anthem. 59. “Einvemehmen zwischen Berlin und Moskau iiber Polen,” Volkischer Beobachter, northern edition, 19 September 1939. 60. Alfred Rambaud, L'Histoire de la Russie (18?), as referred to in A. F. Pollard, The Jesuits in Poland (1892), reprinted by Haskell House Publishers Ltd. (New York, 1971). 61. Pravda, 2 October 1939. In western Belarus and Ukraine, Poles lived primarily in cities, whereas the Belarusian and Ukrainian majorities lived in the countryside. In the Lviv (Lwow), Tarnow, Bialystok, Nowogrodek and Vilnius (Wilno) provinces, Poles were the majority, and Ukrainians or Belarusians made up from 20 to 45 percent of the population. In Stanislaw, Volhynia, and Polesie provinces, Poles were a minority, with Ukrainians or Belarusians making up from 55 to 65 percent of the populations. Aleksander Gieysztor et al., History of Poland (Warsaw: PWN, 1968), 685, 71416. 62. Teresa Toranska, Them: Stalin's Polish Puppets (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 209. 63. Gross, 35. 64. Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitdtenpolitik in der Sowjetunion (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1986), 171-9; Helene Carrered'Encausse, Decline of an Empire (New York: Newsweek Books, 1982), and Confiscated Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 65. Sovietskaia iustitsiia, 7 (1940), 23. Subotin assumed that Russian and Belarusian were interchangeable.

66. Sarmatian Review 9, no. 1 (January 1989). 67. Bruno Bettelheim, “Foreword,” War through Children's Eyes, edited by I. G. Gross and J. T. Gross (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), xiv. 68. Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, May 1939, 8. For a Finnish perception of the Soviet-Finnish war, see Hjalmar J. Procope, Finland Reveals Her Secret Documents: On Soviet Policy March 1940—June 1941 (New York: Funk, 1941). 69. Pravda, 16 June 1940; and Izvestiia, 2 July 1940. 70. Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 11 (November 1940), 59. 71. Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 3 (March 1940), 11. 72. V. Gudkov, “Kul'tura vozrozhdennoi strany,” Pravda, 16 June 1940; “Antisovetskaia belofinskaia fal'shivka,” Izvestiia, 18 September 1941; Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, no. 10 (May 1940), 20-21. 73. Pravda, 14 January 1940; and Izvestiia, 2 July 1940. 74. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 20 October 1940; P. Fedoseev, “Sotsializm i patriotizm,” Kommunist, no. 9 (June 1953), 13; S. Iakubovskaia, “Obrazovanie i rastsvet sotsialisticheskikh natsii v SSSR ,” Kommunist, no. 9 (June 1953), 42-45; and Sotsialisticheskiie natsii SSSR (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1955), 142. 75. Izvestiia, 29 June 1940; and Pravda, 1 September 1940. 76. Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 3 (1941), 35. 77. The following textbooks were examined: A. Romanenko, Posobie po istorii Rossii, XX vek: dlia vypusknikov i postupaiushchikh v vuzy, (St. Pererburg: Triton, 1996); C. Riabikin , Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 1991-1997: Posobie dlia uchitelei, starsheklassnikov, abiturientov i studentov (St. Petersburg: Neva, 1997); S. G. Smirnov, Zadachnik

po istorii Rossii, 2d rev. ed. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia, 1995); A. Orlov et al., Posobiie po istorii otechestva dlia postupaiushchikh v vuzy (Moscow: Prostor, 1994); M. I. Glavatskii, Rossiia, kotoruiu my ne znali, 1939-1993 (Cheliabinsk: IuzhnoUral'skoe Knizhnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1995); Khrestomatiia po istorii dlia shkol i vuzov (Moscow, 1997). Also S.B. Chernyshev, editor, Inoe: Khrestomatiia novogo rossiiskogo samosoznaniia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Argus, 1995). In “Russia Goes Back to School,” Albert Weeks came to favorable conclusions, having examined only two 1997 textbooks, Mir v XX veke and Istoriia Rossii XX vek (Transitions 6, no. 1, January 1999). David Mendeloff disagrees with Weeks’s interpretation in “Overboard on the Praise” ( Transitions 6, no. 3, March 1999). 78. Smirnov, 73. 79. Ibid., 94. 80. In December 1998, the Russian Duma accepted the 1999 Russian budget, about twenty-nine billion dollars at mid-December ruble exchange rates. Of that amount, six billion dollars was designated for the military. Officers received raises of about 100 percent, soldiers of about 60 percent. By implication, teachers, medical personnel, and civil servants were to go unpaid, as no provisions were made in the budget for their wages. Michael Gordon, “Russia Offers 1999 budget,” New York Times, 11 December 1998. 81. A. S. Orlov et al., 112. 82. Ibid., 111. 83. “Vozvrashchenie drevnikh zemel' Belorussii, za vykhod k Baltike.” S. G. Smirnov, 60. 84. Ibid., 6. 85. Glavatskii, ed., Rossiia, kotoruiu my ne znali.

86. Ibid., 401-2. 87. Romanenko, 118. 88. Glavatskii, 12. 89. “Stalin v Ialte poluchil rovno to, chto zapadnyi mir v litse ego liderov ne schital s uverennost'iu svoim.” V. Tsymburskii, “Ostrov Rossiia,” in Chernyshev, ed., Inoe, vol. 2, 213. 90. Romanenko, 118. 91. Vernadsky, A History of Russia, 420, 423. 92. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 516-17. 93. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1968), 505-6. 94. Edward Acton, Russia (London: Longman, 1986), 245-7. 95. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. 96. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 513—44. 97. V. Makhnach, “Imperii v mirovoi istorii,” Chernyshev, ed., Inoe, vol. 2,123. 98. Minutes of Politburo meeting, 23 April 1981, in Glavatskii, ed., 252. 99. Riabikin, 204. 100. Agence France-Presse (Moscow), 31 October 1998. 101. Riabikin, 142. 102. Ibid., 141.

103. Ibid., 247. 104. Brian Whitmore, “Russia: Yeltsin Launches New TV Channel To Control Information,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 29 August 1997. 105. Agence France-Presse, 28 August 1997. 106. Ibid., 14 October 1997. 107. Viktor Erofeev, ed., Russkie tsvety zla (Moscow: Izdate'stvo Dom Podkova, 1997). Essays by Varlam Shalamov, Andrei Siniavskii, Viktor Astafev, Iurii Mamleev, Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov, Viacheslav P’etsukh, Valerii Popov, Sasha Sokolov, Evgenii Kharitonov, Tatiana Tolstaia, Anatolii Gavrilov, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitrii Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Iuliia Kisina, Igor' Arkevich, and Viktor Pelevin. 108. The respondents were asked: “Six years ago, in August 1991, the so-called putsch by the state emergency committee (GKChP) took place. If the GKChP events were to take place today, whose side would you be on?” Agence France-Presse, 21 August 1997. 109. Kommersant, 31 October 1998. 110. Andrei Grachev, “Gorit Vostok zareiu novoi,” Moskovskie novosti, 3-10 August 1997.

7

Deconstructing Empire: Liudmila Petrushevskaia Postcolonial theory is based on an assumption that, in addition to their other functions, texts are vehicles of imperial authority. Imaginative literature underwrites that authority by means of symbolic systems and interpretations of Others that magnify and glorify the Center. Typically, imperial literature abounds in conquering heroes, successful executives, and landowners who are able to assume positions of leadership in public spaces, and in other grand narratives of cultural and political potency. An accumulation of texts invoking these and other positive images and perceptions of the Center homogenizes the cultural ground on which the colonialists stand. Such an accumulation mediates their power. Pushkin invoked Russian civilizational presence in the Caucasus, Solzhenitsyn foregrounded a Russian hospital in an otherwise colorless Tashkent, Rasputin reasserted Russian presence in Siberia, and Tolstoi created that winsome domesticity of the Rostovs that became identified with Russian domesticity tout court. In a more political fashion, the scholars and writers of Soviet Russia availed themselves of the opportunity to extol Russian achievements in centuries past and in the present, further submerging discordant perceptions and images. To undermine that authority and to show its epistemological flaws, contrapuntal voices have to conduct a different discourse, one that contradicts the troubadours of the empire and-'allows suppressed persons, spaces, traditions, events, and images to emerge. In recent years, there have begun to appear writers whose vision of Russia diverges radically from the imperial certainty permeating the texts discussed hitherto. These writers seem to realize that the Russian state’s imperial identity is undergoing a transformation. Some of Russia’s women writers are in the forefront of the rhetorical dismantling of imperial space. They replace the grandeur of the past

with the shabbiness of the present, and they subvert the splendor of imperial imagery by pictures of Russian failure. By presenting a lack of connection between women and the state, women and Empire, writers like Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Tatiana Tolstaia invite the Russian reader to reinvent herself or himself in new conditions. The political writer Valeriia Novodvorskaia is even more direct: she enjoins Russians to abandon the imperial project and allow small nations to raise their own flags, write their own histories, and commit their own mistakes —in short, to abandon colonialism. One of the discoveries of feminism is that woman is the quintessential Other. In some ways, she remains an outsider, even in conditions of imperial power. With a few exceptions, she has been excluded from many entitlements of the imperial enterprise. 1 The job of securing and negotiating the empire has been a male prerogative, and so has much of the empowerment that has come with it. While men appropriated for themselves the etiology and benefits of imperial rule, women had to bear the real costs of prioritizing for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of individuals or families. In Russia in particular, women bore the cost but had little say, notwithstanding the ostensible equality of the sexes that the Soviet system proclaimed, and the legal rights of inheritance that upper-class women enjoyed in tsarist Russia. The figures bear th^s out: by comparison to Western Europe, there were few prominent women in politics or art under the tsars or under the Soviets. At the same time, the assembling of the empire engaged male energies that could otherwise have been spent on family life and assistance to women in raising children and running a household. This created conditions for alienation. In the empire-building narratives, such as those of Pushkin or Lermontov, women are confined to the fuzzy margins of narrative consciousness. They are decorative props that dot the landscape, or the means to make men’s lives more bearable. Bela has to fade away to enable Pechorin and Maksim Maksimych to continue their

task of conquering the Caucasus and observing the local “savages.” Tatiana becomes the trophy wife of a general who distinguished himself in the empire’s aggressive wars. The archetypal Russian woman who is the object of Maksim Maksimych’s dreams lays no claim to a share in public life. Even the women of War and Peace, differentiated and strong as they are, are mute observers of the wars with Napoleon and of male attempts to reform the state. Russia’s imperialist project flows all around them but does not touch them. While there exists in Russian literature a narrative about the strong woman (usually pitted against the so-called superfluous man), in matters pertaining to Empire women have been weak and subservient to the male desire for power. In some ways, of course, Russian women profited from the imperial project. The empire’s borders have been far away from ethnic Russian lands, creating a secure space for wives and mothers to unfold their hearth-keeping instincts. Such gains are not to be scorned: the security of their homes that Russian women could easily afford was a real value, and it empowered Russian families in ways similar to those enjoyed by the English but not Chechen, Uzbek, or Ukrainian families. The “power space” created by the empire cannot be discounted, either: anything Russian profited from Russian power, and the few women in public life were among the beneficiaries. Zinaida Gippius’s popularity abroad was empire generated, in the sense that her foreign admirers and biographers looked at her as a segment of a power-wielding enterprise; had she been Serb or Albanian, the number of her admirers would have shrunk precipitously. The few women writers in Russia, just like the men, operated within the enabling mode of imperial greatness. 2 But most women did not. This was poignantly true of Soviet Russia, where women soon found that the proclaimed liberties translated into double duty, at home and at work. The fate of Soviet women is epitomized by that famous team on the streets of Moscow, in which a couple of women shovel snow under the watchful eye of a male

supervisor. The presence of women in the legislative bodies of the USSR was always in the single-digit percentages. Ekaterina Furtseva was the only woman who ever made it to the fourteenperson Politburo. Under Stalin and later, apartment space (zhilaia ploshchad') to which citizens were entitled was six square meters per person; as Petrushevskaia’s play Music Lessons [Uroki muzyki ] illustrates, not all women were fortunate enough to qualify even for that. While millions of Russian men pursued careers in the military, which afforded an opportunity to live in military lodgings and even to travel abroad, women were mostly confined to their zhilploshchad' in cities and towns. The glass ceiling for women executives, doctors, diplomats, and party workers was real and unchanging, and Soviet statistics reflect consistent gender discrimination in Soviet society. It is this striking alterity of a woman’s fate in a tremendously successful empire that Liudmila Petrushevskaia addresses. Her stories and plays stand in sharp contrast to the male writers’ panoramas of Russian cities and countryside. She is also quite different from such writers as Anna Akhmatova, whose lyrical verse celebrates intimate relationships but whose political poems are virtually gender neutral. Petrushevskaia’s heroines know nothing of the empire’s empowering geography or of its diverse possibilities. Politics is outside their ken. Unlike Oleg Kostoglotov, they do not eye “the wide homeland,” which welcomes any educated Russian with an abundance of jobs and tasks to be performed. Men’s space may be unlimited, but women suffer a perpetual shortage of it, in the largest country in the world. Like Kostoglotov, Petrushevskaia’s women are quite bright, but they are weighed down by family responsibilities, a lack of money, and that crushing tiredness that comes from a failure to achieve. They have none of the political energy that informs Rybakov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s dissidents, and their ability to take the initiative and seize opportunities is even slighter than that of Rasputin’s rural and uneducated male heroes. Petrushevskaia’s texts are devoid of imperial textuality that characterizes the writings of virtually every Russian male writer. Critics have noted that a sense of catastrophe permeates her works.

3 Her women are confined to the Soviet-built apartment houses: they share communal kitchens, bathrooms, corridors, and entrance halls. Their lives are not imperial in the least: their greatest dream is a room of their own, a dream that stands in bitter contrast to the size of the lands their men have conquered. They repeatedly find themselves in no-exit situations. Petrushevskaia makes sure that her stories about these women are fragmentary, that they lack beginnings and endings, somewhat like the life of Sasha Pankratov s native lover, Zida, in Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat. Nothing remarkable ever happens to them, they appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere. They think small and live in a small world. Their lives are disintegrating. The only struggle they are interested in is that between family members for an extra bit of space, physical or psychological. Petrushevskaia’s heroines are usually women in their twenties or thirties, married or unmarried, childless or, more often, mothers of a child whom they passionately love. There usually is only one child. Sometimes they are too desperate and too poor to give birth: in Music Lessons, the pregnant Nadia tries to commit suicide and bears a defective (“headless”) baby. No one cares, of course. The husband or boyfriend is a remote figure. He has either abandoned his family, is lukewarm about commitment, or has another “real” family somewhere else, as does Nikolai Petrovich in Three Girls in Blue [Tri devushki v golubom ]. The woman is alone even if she is flanked by a mother or a mother-in-law, siblings, or friends. The loneliness of women under the Soviet system is a topic that Petrushevskaia handles repeatedly and expertly. Natasha in Syraia noga, He vstrecha druzei [An Undercooked Leg of Lamb, or Friends Meet ] and Ira in Three Girls in Blue live in piercing solitude. Petrushevskaia’s women bear poverty, abandonment, and a devastating lack of physical space in which to unfold, to lie down at night, to hide when misfortune comes. Often they literally lack a place to go to at night. Their mothers’ apartments are crowded, and the priorities tilt heavily toward the man in the family, whether he be husband or son. Their boyfriends do not provide a place to stay; they

are eager to exploit the women sexually but do not commit themselves to a life of togetherness. These recurrent presentations of a stifling lack of a place in which to grow up and develop dismantle the myth of monumentalism that Russian culture so cherishes. The monuments to Russian war heroes dotting Russian cities and villages usually consist of largerthan-life figures with powerful chests and heads held high, the latterday bogatyri and perpetual winners to whom other nations and states give way, as in the famous scene concluding part 1 of Gogol'’s Dead Souls. Russian and Soviet architecture bespeak monumentalism. Peter the Great had his Peterhof covered with gold leaf in a display of imperial spirit, while Stalin had a passion for erecting the biggest and “mostest” buildings, theaters and river dams. J In Soviet times, crossing a street or square in St. Petersburg or Moscow was like taking a hiking trip. The streets of Russia’s two capitals do not resemble at all the comfortable street crossings of European cities, with their urban livability. There are few places in these Western cities, no matter how large, where street lights do not invite pedestrians to venture to the opposite side in reasonable safety, and few squares defy a quick crossing. Land is too expensive down town for parade-size squares in front of ministries and other public buildings. The spatial consciousness of the Europeans carries within itself the memory of a medieval city square, which commanded easy access from all directions. No such spatial memory lingers on in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Petersburg was built long after the medieval way of assembling cities had fallen into disuse, whereas the Kremlin’s origin as a military fortress erected by Italians is all too visible in the design of Moscow’s downtown. In St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace on one side faces a huge square, of the kind suitable for the military parades that once took place there. Never mind that another place for military parades, the Marsovo Field, was nearby. If

one walked along St. Petersburg’s Nevskii Prospekt toward the Neva, starting in the vicinity of the Winter Palace, one had to brave several dangerous crossings to get to the bridge. Then, after a treacherous foot journey of a mile or so, one needed another fifteen minutes to get to the scholarly archive of the Pushkinskii Dom, which otherwise could be described as “just across the Neva.” The Moscow city fathers eliminated many street crossings, inviting passersby to use tunnels instead. Under the Soviets, Moscow streets tended to have more lanes than American freeways. They were inhospitable to pedestrians and to a sense of community. The heart of Moscow still abounds in mega-tourist sights, unfriendly to ambulatory tourists and deprived of intimacy and civic spirit. Past use is one reason for this cult of large sizes; under the Soviets, the purpose was clearly to impress, at the cost of inconveniencing not only passersby but also anyone who worked in that area and would have liked perhaps to go to lunch in a bistro across the street (not that the bistros were readily available either). American cities stand somewhere between the Russian and European cityscapes as far as community spirit and family living are concerned, but they have substituted for their relatively inhospitable downtowns the suburbias where single-family houses set back from tree-lined roads allow one to forget about the city centers, dotted with skyscrapers. The Russian answer to suburbia is rows of huge apartment blocks. This monumentalism finds its parallel, and perhaps a stimulus, in the geographical vastness of Russia. The mere mention of Siberia in The Brothers Karamazov conjures up massive possibilities. While Dmitrii Karamazov spurns the advice that would have placed him in the gold fields of Yakutia, its imaginary parameters add to Dostoevskii’s novel a mysterious if unused space where those who are out of breath can retreat and find a new beginning. For Rodion Raskol'nikov in Crime and Punishment, that potential new beginning becomes a reality in Siberia. A Soviet song says “Vast is my native land” (Shiroka strana moia rodnaia). Vastness is a commodity that Russians have internalized and that could and still can be had for free, if one is a Russian. As Valeriia Novodvorskaia wrote in an essay discussed below, Russians have always had tons of

geography.” 4 On 28 July 1998, the former Russian minister of medium and small business affairs, Irina Khakhamada, advised the wives of striking Vorkuta miners to supplement their food supplies by collecting berries, mushrooms, and other edibles in the vast forests of the Russian north. 5 While this is poor economic advice in postcommunist times, it ranks high as a statement about the advantages of controlling nearly one-sixth of the globe. It confidently reminds the poverty-stricken workers that if the worst comes to worst, they can still live off the land, not only by gathering forest bounty but also by cultivating small plots of land, which each city dweller or kolkhoz worker can have for next to nothing. In the “Russian” Federation, the number of acres of forest per citizen is still the highest in the world. On 30 July 1998, Reuters reported that “Russia feeds itself from its dachas—country houses where workers unpaid for months spend their weekends growing potatoes to tide them by until companies pay their dues and the economy gets back on its feet after half a decade of crisis.” Again, while this way of facing an economic crisis does not propel the Russian industrial machine forward, it prevents famine and a total breakup of society. Russia’s land glut carries many advantages for the country’s scant population. Russia’s male writers have generally taken advantage of the artistic possibilities that the vastness of their country engenders. The monumentalism in architecture finds its echoes in literature, as witnessed by the Romantic adventure stories and Symbolist poems and novels, such as Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, Blok’s “The Scythians,” or Belyi’s St. Petersburg. Grand things can happen among the grand structures conjured up by these writers—and they do. The rapidity with which the imperial space shrinks in Petrushevskaia’s texts is therefore remarkable. The small flats in which the university-educated heroines conduct the business of life contrasts sharply with the grandiose outdoor and indoor adventures of earlier Russian heroes. There are no monuments in Petrushevskaia’s stories and plays, no sacred territories like those

male Russian writers used to celebrate Russian nationhood, nothing to remind the reader of the glories of Russian history. The Russian imagination has traditionally rejoiced in “unencompassable Russia” ( neobozrimaia Rus'), as in Gumilev’s poem “The Peasant” [“Muzhik”]; from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn, Russians have taken pride in the size of their land just as other nations take pride in their manufactured goods. That pride is gone in Petrushevskaia. Neobozrimaia Rus' is nowhere to be found in her world. Her heroines are forever confined to their tiny stoves in sublet rooms. Their imaginations have ceased to work in such a way as to appropriate large territories for their own use. Being “out there,” in the Far East, in Siberia or Kamchatka, brings private disasters to the heroines, as in “Nets and Traps” [“Seti i lovushki”], while the more desirable foreign space near the Baltic Sea delivers on its promises only in small ways. Petrushevskaia brings home the message that Russian women have hardly profited from the imperial successes of Russian men. The imperial tradition in Russia includes parades, flags, and the mythology of Moscow as the focus of the fierce love that Russians have been indoctrinated to feel toward their rodina/otechestvo. In Petrushevskaia’s works, this symbolism is undone by trivialization and ridicule. A reshaping of dominant meanings takes place. The women do not long for Moscow, as they did in Chekhov’s play; many of them live there, and they have acquired education and jobs of which Chekhov’s women could only dream. But their lives are even more miserable than those of Chekhov’s three sisters. They have long given up beautiful hopes. They never participate in public events. The all-embracing failure of communist propaganda, which tried to make every individual into a political creature, is nowhere better displayed than by Petrushevskaia’s heroines. The mythology of the imperial capital eludes them; the charm of living in Moscow is nowhere to be found in her texts. The capital is simply a place to live, an urban center where one hunts for food, and where one’s acquaintances live in similar conditions. Nor has the dream of Moscow been replaced by a dream of alien geographies:

Petrushevskaia’s women do not wish to travel abroad, nor do they fantasize about moving to another city where life might be kinder and easier. Such dreams are simply beyond their “dream range.” If remote localities are mentioned, they lack specifics; they are faceless, somewhat like the lunar landscapes, which repel normal life; or they are just points on the map from which one arrives, or to which one travels to no avail, as does Ol'ga in An Undercooked Leg of Lamb, who takes her baby girl Verunia to subarctic Vorkuta. The imaginative command that Russian writers used to exercise over the remote spots on the empire’s map is entirely gone. No outburst of hope accompanies the memory of these places. The memories associated with them are grim leitmotifs, and they portend an array of miseries and disasters. The remote localities do not deliver on their promises, and people come back from them empty-handed, as does Olga. In Music Lessons, a certain Ivanov gets drunk and says in desperation that he will “enlist for the north.” In “Nets and Traps,” the heroine’s parents cannot help her because they live “in the Far East.” In “Pania’s Poor Heart [ Bednoe serdtse Pani”], going north after an abortion symbolizes the laborer Pania’s hopeless fate. The massive tsarist and Soviet efforts to resettle the Russian population in Asia at the expense of the Russian mainland, and the resulting breakup of families and links of support, are repeatedly brought up in such stories. One of the advantages of imperial vision is the vast scale it can afford. The imperial eye can see farther than the eye of an inhabitant of a small principality in the Caucasus, Central Asia, or for that matter, on the Baltic coast. It is no accident that histories of the world have generally been written by persons whose homes were empires. While the Russian empire did not produce visions as sweeping as those of the French, British, Spanish, or German imperia, its literate residents did acquire opportunities to keep their fingers on the world’s political and economic pulse. In War and Peace, even in Cancer Ward, Russians are participating in world history. So much more striking is the narrowness of horizons evident in Petrushevs'kaia’s world, which knows nothing of these imperial advantages. Her Russia is as unimperial as could be, even though at

the time of her writing it had not yet entered an obvious decline. Not only are the horizons narrow; gone is also the awareness of privileges and prospects. In War and Peace, there is a scene in which the Rostov children and their playmates run into the drawing room laughing and shouting. Children never run, much less laugh, in Petrushevskaia’s stories and plays, if only because commu nal apartments do not provide the space necessary to do so. In “The Time: Night” [“Vremia: noch'”], the little boy Tima tries to crawl around in someone else’s apartment, touching objects that stimulate his interest. His own flat is monotonously well known to him. He is scolded for his enterprising spirit and is told to sit quietly. In Three Girls in Blue, a relative abundance of space at the dacha stimulates the children to fight each other rather than explore the environs together. Petrushevskaya’s geography is thus strikingly different from that of Russian male writers. It includes small sections of ethnic Russia: a city, a town, and within them a few streets, perhaps a grocery store, and the inevitable lines in which so many hours have to be spent almost every day—then a return to one’s cot, which stands too close to the cots of other people. Few luxuries are in evidence in that world: cars, fur coats, restaurants, and theaters are outside the realms of experience of these otherwise middle-class heroines (another fiction deconstructed: that of the Soviet people being voluntary theater goers and avid readers of classical literature). Riding in a taxi is an event to remember and commemorate, as in An Undercooked Leg of Lamb. Going out with a man who has a car is a life-changing adventure, as in Three Girls in Blue. Even the underground, an affordable luxury for all inhabitants of Moscow, plays a negligible role; somehow joyrides on the metro, so beloved by tourists, leave this writer’s women cold. Petrushevskaia’s mapping of novelistic space goes against the grain of Russian literary habits and expectations. While a few of her heroines have habitable dachas, most do not, or at least we never

hear of them. What we hear about is minuscule shelters from rain and cold, never a spare bedroom, let alone a second bathroom— rooms in which the inhabitants sleep on sofas, sofa-beds, on the floor, or on folding beds ( raskladushka ) in the kitchen, as does the pregnant Milochka in “Poetry in Life” [“Poeziia v zhizni”]. Such crowding does not preclude accommodating an extra person or two: in Music Lessons, a two-room apartment inhabited by a married couple, their son, and a mother-in-law is eyed enviously by the son’s girlfriend, who considers such luxurious quarters the only enticement to marriage. The condition of ownership, such as possession of a china cabinet, is a forbidden pleasure; there is no room for such luxuries, and in “Such a Girl, the Conscience of the World,” the narrator keeps her Czech crystal in the kitchen. The zhilaia ploshchad' of ordinary Russians has no room for two sets of dishes, even if finances would permit the purchase of them. An accumulation of such images deconstructs the memories of Soviet monuments and of tsarist palaces, of Red Square and Aleksandrovskii Square, of vast fields and forests; it bespeaks their Potemkin-like quality, their unreality when viewed from the perspective of Russia’s women. The smallness of Petrushevskaia’s world means that there are virtually no crowd scenes in her stories. There are only relationships, most often failed relationships between individuals. This defies the male Soviet writers’ predilection for depicting political events, “people’s achievements” and the like. There are no war heroes in Petrushevskaia and no heroes of socialist labor. It is as if she consciously tried to superimpose her script on the script of socialist realist writers, as well as on that of dissident writers, defying patterns, norms, and expectations. One perceives in her texts a defiance of the grand plans of Russia’s political class. Each of her stories is an admission of imperial failure. She demonstrates that Russian women live as if they were citizens of some obscure principality ruled by a heartless tyrant whose name is too dangerous to mention or even think about. They are reconciled to the vicious circle of growing up; finding a husband (or not); having a child; struggling to balance work and housekeeping; taking the child to day

care; getting rid of or tolerating an abusive and useless husband, common-law husband, or relative; and then dying in terminal discomfort and humiliation, as does Anna Andrianovna’s mother in “Time: Night.” In the play A Separate Corner [Izolirovannyi boks ], two women talk in a hospital room for the terminally ill. They are dying of cancer. They do not know each other, but their loneliness compels them to tell each other about their lives. One of them confesses that her unmarried daughter, who had just buried a daughter conceived out of wedlock, takes trips to the Baltic republics to catch a husband. It is to no avail; her misery travels with her and prevents her from netting a man. She does, however, buy goods there that are unavailable in Moscow. The reader notes that the Baltic republics may be Russian dominated, but they do not yield great advantages to ordinary Russian women. The other woman has a fourteen-year-old son, Vania, but no other close relatives. The older woman advises her to write a letter to her employers asking them to take Vania on as an apprentice. It turns out that Vania’s mother had herself been abandoned by her parents. Then Vania’s mother reminisces about a certain family who lived in one room and witnessed two deaths in that room: those of a fifty-year-old mother and her twenty-sevenyear-old son. When Vania’s mother expresses concern about her own underage son, who will soon be an orphan, the older woman reminds her. “And how did we grow up?” (A my kak rosli?) This exclamation signals the continuity of misery and a lack of improvement in the lives of children as compared to those of their parents. While the Soviet elites tried to conjure up vistas of virgin soil upturned, in reality Soviet women were growing up in broken homes where family members watched each other suffer and die in the minuscule zhilploshchad' allotted to them by the state. The identity of Petrushevskaia’s space never leaves any doubt of its nature. This is not colonial space, as in the narratives of her contemporaries Rybakov, Rasputin, and Solzhenitsyn. It is not the nostalgic space of the tsarist empire either, as in such historical hovels as The Evil Force [Nechistaia sila\ (1989) by Valentin Pikul'.

Petrushevskaia’s space is more like the constricted arena of Samuel Beckett’s plays; from these spaces there is no exit. Her heroines live in sorrow and solitude, and no advantages of Russia’s greatness accrue to them. They lack territory in ways no inhabitant of the crowded cities of first-world countries lacks it; they have nowhere to sleep, make love, or conduct intimate conversations. In “Poetry in Life,” the heroine loses her virginity after a few nights of resistance to her husband’s advances, while her mother-inlaw sleeps just inches away in the same tiny room. Having heard the commotion night after night but unable to see any traces of blood in the morning, the mother-in-law concludes that the bride is not a virgin; when blood appears after the girl finally gives in, the motherin-law says that it was produced by the girl’s monthly period. This story harks back to Chekhov, in that it shows both the young wife’s virginal modesty (how like the country heroines of Chekhov and Turgenev) and the vulgarity and brutality that nips such feelings in the bud. It also suggests that imperial greatness did not protect Russia’s women from kinds of humiliation that even the subaltern peoples were usually spared. In “Grim fate” [“Temnaia sud'ba”], a woman between thirty and forty years of age lives in an efficiency apartment with her mother. She never had a boyfriend, because she never had a private place in which she could be alone with a man for any length of time. She envies married women and also those who have had lovers, however unattractive or exploitative. Her longing for some private time with a male, when she can act out her own destiny, is so intense that one day she arranges for her mother to spend the night elsewhere and invites in an aging and married coworker. The man is truly unattractive, but he is willing to accommodate her unstated wish. To accentuate the festive occasion, she buys a cake and a bottle bf wine. The man eats ravenously, undresses, does what he was invited to do, and departs shortly afterwards, grabbing another piece of cake on the way. In these conditions, Russian women enter adulthood and old age with serious psychological disorders. In “A Pass” [“Propusk”], a woman named Rimma is interviewed for a job by a certain Tarasov.

She does not get the job, but she becomes infatuated with Tarasov and begins to stalk him. To enter a government building one needs a special pass, and such a pass is denied to Rimma when her intentions become clear to those surrounding Tarasov. She then begins to badger him by phone. She demands a pass, complaining that Tarasov is harassing her. Her mania for Tarasov is a form of unrequited love, a manifestation of a desperate need for human interaction; she gives up her job to spend more time chasing him and becomes totally impoverished. Eventually, she is so overwhelmed by her delusion that she does not notice the real Tarasov when he travels next to her in a subway car. The fascination with men that Petrushevskaia’s women occasionally display is echoed in Tatiana Tolstaia’s ironic and witty prose. That fascination stems at least partly from the paucity of intimate opportunities for women in Soviet Russia. They could be raped, but they seldom had an opportunity to be courted. In “The Poet and the Muse,” a level-headed medical doctor falls for a disheveled poet who makes his living as a janitor. He is desperately poor and lives in a hovel. She takes him under her wing, marries him, brings him to her comfortable apartment, and tries to induce him to write politically correct verse. But the poet is not willing to be transformed into a Soviet writer. He runs away from his well-meaning wife, associates with “scum” like himself, and finally dies, having bequeathed his skeleton to the teaching hospital where his wife works. The skeleton is put on display, enabling the widow to pass the remains of her deceased husband on a daily basis. The story’s humorous anti-Soviet tone has been amply foregrounded in commentaries, and feminine possessiveness has likewise been noted; 6 in addition to these features, however, Tolstaia touches upon a theme that occupies center stage in Petrushevskaia—the inability of women under the Soviet Russian regime to relate to men in ways satisfactory to both parties. While the destructiveness of the empire seems to be a marginal element of Tolstaia’s oeuvre, her recurrent musings upon the frustrated female’s fate bring her close

to Petrushevskaia’s discovery that the Russian women’s Otherness is not just a function of Sovietstyle poverty but also of imperial imbalances. Both writers recognize the disabling of women by the empire. Whether it is the necessity of moving away from the family to “upturn the virgin soil” or of finding adequate clothing and food in Moscow while the men are busy maintaining and enlarging the borders of the rodina, women are burdened with impossible duties, for which rewards are few and far between. Hence arise alienation from the empire, various behavioral pathologies, and the crushing hopelessness that permeates Petrushevskaia’s fictional world. The children of women disadvantaged by the empire are covictims. In the play “I Am Sorry for Sweden” [“la boleiu za Shvetsiiu”] Kalia, Dima’s stepmother, has just buried her husband, who had died of a sudden heart attack. Both she and her stepson feel guilty, because upon returning home on the fatal day, the father had been told that Dima had been expelled from school; moreover, Kalia had conveyed the message in a quarrelsome manner. In the meantime, the telephone keeps ringing. At first, no one speaks when Kalia or Dima lift the receiver; they conjecture that Dima’s schoolmates are playing pranks on their bereft pal. Eventually the caller asks for a certain Ania, and it becomes clear that the calls come from Dima’s grandmother, who had just arrived from Kemerovo. It turns out that before the father’s heart attack, Dima’s grandmother (the deceased father’s mother-in-law) had called him repeatedly to ask about the circumstances of her daughter’s death, attributing that death to an unhappy marriage. The daughter, Ania Vorontsova, had in fact committed suicide because her husband was having an affair with Kalia. Kalia’s and Dima’s respective feelings of guilt diminish upon hearing the grandmother’s confession, but Kalia is determined to commit suicide when the children (Dima and her own son, Sasha) grow up and do not need her any longer. As if this were not tragic enough for one family, it turns out that the grandmother had slept at the railway station for the past week, having been expelled from her son’s house in Kemerovo as a nuisance; also, Sasha resides in a day care center, from which he is

brought home once a week. Dima’s words about his father and mother “dying like dogs” resound with particular poignancy, as does his prediction that his grandmother and the entire family will also “die like dogs.” Even by Petrushevskaia’s standards, this is an exceptionally somber tale. It shows that resettlement in a remote and semicolonial territory (Kemerovo is a coal mining town in Siberia) does not solve the problems of zhilaia ploshchad' for poor Russians, that in fact it would benefit such families to live together in central Russia. It would be cheaper for the Russian government to feed and house its citizens in the more densely populated areas around Moscow or Vologda than in Kemerovo. But Russia’s elites have decreed otherwise, and the price is paid by families like those of Kalia, Dima, and the grandmother Vorontsova. Petrushevskaia’s striking originality is nowhere better demonstrated than in this play. She hammers home the message that Russia’s political power, its Siberian riches and metropolitan art centers, its palaces, squares, dance ensembles, and monuments matter not one iota to the people, who in many ways are the only thing that really matters in society. The polity is sick, and its effort to uphold military power and leadership in cultural matters is being exerted at the expense of the people. Petrushevskaia dismantles imperial space not by declaring the absurdity of Moscow’s claims to Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, to the Far East or Latvia, not by suggesting that the riches of the Hermitage Museum be sold to the highest bidder, but by showing what happens to societal structures in the aftermath of imperial exertions. She is a family writer par excellence, and she stands alone in pronouncing harsh judgments on Russia’s priorities; not even Solzhenitsyn, who blamed the powers that be for Russian misery, can compaife to her. Russia’s borders and Russia’s international prestige matter not a bit to her, while they do matter to Solzhenitsyn. Petrushevskaia defends one’s right to privacy and not devotion to the rodina, and in that she diverges sharply from the tradition of Russian prose.

She is also aware of Russia’s relations with its non-Russian subjects. In “Such a Girl, the Conscience of the World” [“Takaia devochka, sovest' mira”] (1968), the heroine, Raisa Ravilia, is an ethnic Tatar whose present is as hopeless and horrible as her past. Raisa has worked since she was five years old when her job is to make pillboxes by hand. She and her mother make a living from this cottage industry: her drunkard father gives them no support (Petrushevskaia helps to deconstruct the myth that an array of satisfactory jobs was available to Soviet women) When her mother dies, the father begins to entertain women in the room he shares with his daughter, and Raisa becomes a reluctant and frequent witness to sexual orgies, which not only deprive her of good childhood memories but also drain her will. She falls victim to a sexual pathology that characterizes so many of Petrushevskaia’s heroines. As a young woman, she is unable to cook, eat, tidy up her room, or take care of herself. She paces back and forth in her room as if it were a prison, unable to go out for a walk or look for a job. By a perverse twist of fate, this excessive passivity makes her desirable to men. One of these men marries her, but the rest continue to take advantage of her whenever they find themselves alone with her—not only friends and acquaintances but also strangers, such as postmen, repairmen, or chance visitors to the communal apartment. It is not that Raisa is a prostitute: she would merely stare at her attackers as if begging to be left alone, which has a quite opposite effect. These repeated rapes eventually estrange Raisa from the wife of one of the rapists, who is also the narrator of the story. As is often the case in Petrushevskaia, the skaz narrator knows much less than the reader; she is unable to see the full implications of the story she is telling. She completely forgets about Raisa after discovering that her husband had sex with her, even though Raisa had once saved her from a suicide attempt and provided a sympathetic ear for her confidences. When Mrs. Petrova (the narrator) leams that her husband has ravished Raisa, she begins to despise her and refuses to speak to her.

This is an eerie metaphor for the Russian popular consciousness, which has forgotten about the ravished non-Russians in the empire. The unself-conscious simplicity with which the narrator cuts Raisa off —“It is as if she died, she meant nothing more for me, perhaps she really died”—parallels the clear conscience with which Russian culture has dismissed the problem of colonialism and the oppressive ideological straitjacket imposed on alien nations by tsars and commissars. 7 “Such a Girl, the Conscience of the World” symbolizes the destruction of native peoples under Russian rule. In this story, the empire does not write back, as it does in so many postcolonial texts written in Asia or Africa and published in the West. It does not even speak back. Raisa Ravilia remains silent throughout the story. Her only utterance is, “Let us do it together, wait for me” (Davai vmeste, davai vmeste, podozhdi menia), as the narrator attempts to hang herself. Petrushevskaia herself determined the sequence of her writings in the fivevolume Collected Works, which came out in 1996. She selected “Such a Girl” as the lead story. It is therefore fair to assume that Raisa Ravilia’s Tatar background is not an accidental detail. Virtually all other stories deal with heroines of Russian extraction. Raisa comes from the background of grinding poverty and dissolution of family life that is recurrent in Petrushevskaia’s works, but her fate is a notch more tragic than those of the native Russian women characters. She so loses her instinct for self-preservation that anyone can hurt her without fear of consequences. Raisa is more thoroughly a “goner” than anyone else in Petrushevskaia’s texts. The narrator points out that Raisa’s total helplessness awakes Russian men’s hunting instincts. It is hard to miss the suggestion that she stands for the lands Russia raped, while Sevka, who marries her, epitomizes the “marriage” between Tatarstan and Russia—a marriage desired by the Russians but uncalled for from Tatarstan’s perspective. The problem of abortion is another recurrent topic of Petrushevskaia’s stories, and she shows it to be related to the problems of Empire. The Soviet state had a remarkably high rate of

abortions, contraception being a psychological and financial luxury. Abortions, however, were not performed with uniform frequency in all the republics of the USSR. The Muslim republics had a relatively low rate, while the Russian heartland led the way, with as many as eight abortions per woman recorded. As late as 1997, 2.5 million abortions were performed in the Russian Federation. 8 Demographic statistics show that the Russian population began to shrink in the mid-1990s, in spite of a high rate of immigration of ethnic Russians from the former Soviet republics. In 1991, it stood at 148,689,000, while in 1999 it decreased to 145.9 million. 9 Furthermore, two women in three suffer from health complications as a result of terminated pregnancies. 10 The demographic and medical decline is one of the aspects of the waning of Russia’s colonial power: a state in such a decline is headed for labor shortages, not to speak of a deficit of recruits for the military. Petrushevskaia clearly considers this rate of abortion to be destructive of the women involved. She almost compulsively puts a baby somewhere in the life trajectory of her women, as if to remind the reader that there are too few babies in contemporary Russia. Often the baby has been aborted or is abandoned, or it is raised by a grandmother; virtually never does a baby in her stories enjoy normal family life. But its presence reminds the reader that in the private world that Petrushevskaia’s heroines inhabit, the craving for babies is a normal and frequent thing, and that their scarcity is related to the problems of absent men and skimpy zhilploshchad'. One of Petrushevskaia’s most powerful plays, A Meeting [ Svidanie ], begins in a whisper but rises in a psychological crescendo until the truth is out. There are only three characters in the play: mother, son, and a prison guard who does not say a word. The mother visits her imprisoned son, urging him to eat more of the dainties she prepared for him. In particular, she wants him to drink a colmpote in which she takes great pride. Since “they” allowed her to visit, she says, “they” will set him free as well. There is nothing to worry about. The son’s response is no, and a swear word. Petrushevskaia crafts a negative

image of the criminal, the better to prepare the listener for the shock of the denouement. The son asks about his girlfriend. Now it is the mother’s turn to swear. She complains that it was his girlfriend, Lerka, that had brought him to his present state. Little by little, it transpires that Lerka has given birth to a baby, though she had been urged to get an abortion. The prisoner becomes feverish: where is Lerka now? She needs help; what about the baby? The mother answers reluctantly. The son recalls that Lerka’s parents, her sister, and two friends, had all urged her to get an abortion. The two friends were nurses, who he says routinely assisted at as many as thirty abortions per day. There follows a graphic description of a late-term abortion. “They are all murderers, murderers!” shouts the man. “That is why I killed them!” It transpires that the hysterical son had murdered the five people who had urged an abortion and has been sentenced to death. The mother still hopes against hope that “something can be done,” but, to quote Pasternak’s “Hamlet,” “the order of the scenes has been thought out, and the end of the road is inevitable.” The play ends with no hope in sight. The humiliation of the imperial nation’s women reaches its apogee in such texts, replete as they are with material for feminist ire. In “Pania’s Poor Heart” a forty-seven-year-old woman in bad health, whose carpenter husband is likewise an invalid, faces an unwanted pregnancy. She insists on an abortion, even though she is already in her seventh month; she carries the necessary permits and papers like a banner, unshaken in her belief that a certificate of “danger to the mother’s health” is sufficient reason for the physician to terminate the preg Deconstructing Empire 213 nancy. The doctor fakes an abortion and delivers the infant. The baby girl is whisked away, and Pania departs triumphantly to somewhere in the remote north. She never asks questions about

what happened. She is preoccupied with getting well, because to get home she has to travel by train and then walk twelve kilometers to the settlement where she works as a watchwoman (for an electrical power station plant, conceived by Soviet planners under the influence of the monumentalist and imperialist urge). The GRES station lacks capital to ensure that the Russians who work there have a decent standard of living; there is only enough to ensure that Russia-as-empire profits from the enterprise. Unlike Western Europeans, for whom the colonies provided a privileged living standard in addition to international prestige, Petrushevskaia’s heroines lead as miserable a life in the conquered territory as they do in Moscow. No advantages accrue to Pania for having moved to the remote stroika (building enterprise), which is situated on the edge of the Russian ethnic area. The empire transported her and other laborers far away “for the good of the cause,” but the cause was not hers. The imperial project assumes a life separate from that of the Russian women. Until Petrushevskaia arrived with her persistent irony, Russian writers routinely disconnected the empire’s greatness from an individual’s misery. The latter was blamed on the system, whether it be communism or tsarist autocracy, rather than on economic priorities stemming from maintenance of an empire. Petrushevskaia’s grim refusal to blame the system (in contrast to those who blame Russia’s woes exclusively on communist tyranny and postcommunist corruption) bespeaks a discovery no writer before her had made. The disease goes well beyond the political system in Russia: the empire is the disease. On those rare occasions when political metaphors make their appearance in Petrushevskaia’s texts, they are used to stress the fact that political life is a sideshow, insofar as Russia’s women are concerned. In “Time: Night,” the desperate Alena shows up in her mother’s apartment and says, “I am asking for political asylum” (Proshu politicheskogo ubezhishcha ). Life with her criminal and sexually abusive companion made her quarrelsome mother’s apartment seem relatively bearable. Alena’s choice of expression shows how

remote the concerns of the so-called dissidents were from the priorities of ordinary Russian women. The mothers and grandmothers of such heroines as Nina in Music Lessons, having lived out their lives in cramped and humiliating conditions, are reluctant to “move over” and make space for the next generation. They hang on, tooth and nail, to their beds and rooms, moving only against their will. In “The Time: Night,” the grandmother is too en£eebfed in mind and body to fight for her space in the small flat where her granddaughter wants to settle with her three children. Her daughter, Anna Andrianovna (Alena’s mother) takes her to a warehouse for old folks that does not even deserve to be called a retirement home. Granny will die there within weeks, it is implied; her daughter’s pangs of conscience are real and deep. The total disintegration of family life in this story, published in 1992, epitomizes the ongoing disintegration of the state that was paying with crushed lives for its magnificent military, political, and cultural achievements. Nor are these miseries confined to workers’ families. A vast majority of Petrushevskaia’s heroines are well educated. They occasionally listen to Mozart, as in “The Cycle” [“Tsikl”]. Many are students. The educated stratum of society is initiated into adulthood in dormitory rooms, where furniture consists of four beds, a table in the center, and night tables covered with bottles of cosmetics C Music Lessons ). In “Our Crowd” [“Svoi krug”], virtually all characters have university degrees. They live in inadequate flats, where grandchildren compete for space with grandparents, and where a mother who keeps her terminal illness secret beats her child in front of her friends to generate sympathy for the child. She hopes that after her demise, her ex-husband (now an acquaintance) will take the boy in. Obviously a detdom, or the Soviet version of an orphanage, is not considered an option, even in comparison to the horrid conditions of overcrowded communal dwellings. Petrushevskaia’s art of understatement reaches its apogee in a story entitled “A Country” [“Strana”] which is less than two pages long. In it, a pensive narrator meditates about the life of a single mother, an

alcohol addict who nevertheless neatly folds up every night her daughter’s clothing so that it will be ready for the morning trip to a day care center. She was married once, but now her former common-law husband has a new wife, and all of the couple’s friends have chosen him as well. The mother figures out that she can spend her portion of the money on drink instead of food—besides, the daughter is fed at the day care. She goes to bed at nine to save on electricity bills and then rushes on to her job in the morning; when the day’s work is over, she drops in at a store for a bottle, picks up her daughter, and the cycle begins again. The loneliness of the mother is quite unlike the standard displays of loneliness in Russian letters, where even lonely and tormented souls like Raskol'nikov eventually rejoin a broader humanity. The title of the story suggests that in twentieth-century Russia one is exposed to a kind of loneliness where no help comes from family, friends, the state, or fate, and that Russian women have surrendered to it. The alcoholic mother’s meekness is symptomatic of Russian society, which does not protest the trillions of rubles spent on the state-of-the-art military while generation after generation of Russians live in squalor. In these stories, the world consists almost exclusively of dysfunctional households, girls who want to run away from abusive and incestuous parents, as does Tania in “Father and Mother” [“Otets i mat'”], or lonely females who admire the chutzpah of their more energetic peers (as does Nadia Romanova in “The Cycle”). If Petrushevskaia had peppered her texts with such disorders without making them mercilessly recurrent, she would not have diverged from other late Soviet and post-Soviet writers. In Rasputin’s and Solzhenitsyn’s texts, there are also quite a few dysfunctional families and plenty of hopeless situations. But to make this state-induced tragedy the central theme of one’s work without invoking either communism or some other systemic fault bespeaks a conscious intent to show the incongruity between the monumental faqade and the putrid content of the imperial state. Tatiana Tolstaia, who is more light-hearted and pun-loving than Petrushevskaia, conjured up a similar atmosphere in stories about

women who are single and childless (“The Moon Came Out”), as well as in stories about single mothers (“Night”). While Tolstaia is more of a poet than Petrushevskaia, “Night” [“Noch 1 ”] in particular could have come from the older writer’s pen. The place of action is Soviet Russia. A retired female worker lives with her retarded son in a communal apartment. She does not starve, as witnessed by her 290 pounds avoirdupois; but then, we never leam whether she is fat or just waterlogged. She is old, and there is no husband. She protects her Aleksei Petrovich as best she can, but he gets out into the street and is almost killed by traffic. By a stroke of luck, he is brought back to the warm burrow of their shared room. His mother prepares their meals in a communal kitchen. He watches her undress and take her teeth out. She worries about his future: what will happen when she dies, which is bound to occur soon? As in Petrushevskaia, there is no social safety net (the story deconstructs the myth of the cradle-to-grave security, for which so many Western academics have fallen), and no family support. But unlike Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia makes her unattractive heroine read Pushkin’s poetry to her son, who in turn wants to become a writer. Such upper-class frivolities are alien to Petrushevskaia’s bread-andbutter world, where women barely manage to survive in spite of their diplomas and time served in academic dormitories. Tolstaia did, of course, come from a privileged family: her grandfather was Aleksei N. Tolstoi, a Soviet writer (described as opportunistic by the mildmannered William E. Harkins 11 ). In “Such a Girl,” Czech glasses are associated with luxury, pleasure, and a holiday atmosphere. They are foreign. Similarly, the Hungarian hose in A Separate Corner is among the few items that brighten up the drabness of the heroines’ lives. While in the 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia and Hungary were part of the Soviet bloc, there was enough residual feeling about their being “Western” to create the pleasant excitement that Moscow women felt when Central European items would appear in Moscow shops. Whatever comes from the West is better than things Russian: another indicator of the humiliating form the colonial consciousness has taken in Petrushevskaia’s texts. Not that this form of consciousness is

confined to her works: as far back as Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1940), the attitude of respect and apprehension toward the West was a clear signal that the imperial structuring of discourse was faulty and collapsible. In contrast, the colonial consciousness of Western Europeans dictated that foreign space was not a place where things \ypre done better or more efficiently than in the metropolis but rather a storeroom or a country house, where one kept one’s “second best.” In Petrushevskaia, the pride of the empire is entirely gone, and life in the metropolis ranks dead last in terms of desirability and creature comforts. Related to this vanishing pride is the reappearance of bodily functions and excrement in Petrushevskaia’s texts. Not since the Middle Ages have there been in narratives so many human smells, turds, and other reminders of human beings physical nature. But while in Geoffrey Chaucer they were associated with merriment, in Petrushevskaia they mark degradation and debasement. Such leitmotifs disappeared almost completely from imperial Russian literature of the nineteenth century, just as they did from Victorian literature. Like the seamy side of imperialism, excrement was confined to the zone of the unspoken, its presence soon liquidated by an army of servants; or, as Said points out, it was the realm of the subalterns, as in narratives about the dirty Arabs whose lasciviousness was matched only by their lack of cleanliness. In “Time: Night,” it reappears with the sights of decaying empire. When the narrator’s daughter, Alena, bears her first child, she and her mother are traveling in a taxi whose back seat is covered “metaphorically speaking, with excrement” ( zakakannoe v perenosnom smysle sideni'e taksi ). 12 Alena contributes mightily to the mess originally found in the taxi. The great-grandmother, known by her nickname of baba rather than babushka, a kinder word for grandmother, is called kakunia, a shitter, by her daughter. She defecates in bed, indeed wherever she happens to find herself, and her lack of personal hygiene (not that she can help it) is one reason why she is taken to a Soviet-style retirement home. Her incontinence

on a frosty night outdoors is described in great detail: first it offers her warmth, but all too soon the urine begins to chill her legs. In the meantime, the narrator’s daughter, Alena, nurses her own story—conveyed to the reader in italics, to distinguish it from her mother’s story. Alena’s secret diary records her bitter memories of the first rape. The palpability of flesh and blood in that description and the pathetic tone of the victim’s helplessness make it a very feminist text. Its poignancy is further highlighted by the second rape, in different circumstances and by a different man. Children are thus produced: the mother (still a middle-aged and good-looking woman, with potential affairs of her own) tells Alena that her youngest baby, Kolia, should have been “scraped out.” She says that knowing full well that she has given, and will give, her last kopeck to feed the three children Alena has produced so far. It is for the sake of her grandchildren that she puts away her own mother, now stricken with senile dementia and a multitude of physical ills. In Three Girls in Blue, one of the central concerns of the “girls” is the toilet. Irina’s lover builds a toilet in her country dacha, as a gift to her; the concern is that other girls and their children would dirty the toilet. Sex likewise loses its mysterious intimacy, without becoming entertainment. In “Poetry in Life,” the loss of virginity of the heroine occurs at night in a room occupied also by the girl’s mother-in-law, whose outstretched hand could easily penetrate the lover’s privacy. “Time: Night” presents three generations of women whose fates are singularly tragic yet strikingly similar. The great-grandmother’s advice to her young daughter (now a grandmother to three fatherless children) is similar to the advice the narrator bestows on Alena, and it is similarly disregarded. Anna Andrianovna had married badly, as did her daughter Alena, and she had had two children (Alena has three). Her son Andrei had served time in jail; upon returning home he terror ized the household and stole his mother’s money. (In Petrushevskaia’s texts, grown-up sons typically extort or steal money from their mothers: such is the case also in An Undercooked Leg of

Lamb.) In the meantime Alena, who has a love/hate relationship with her hysterical mother, shows a pathological inability to defend herself from rape. The apartment reeks: the grandmother regularly urinates in bed. Anna is a poet, and she gives readings of poetry in factories and schools (Petrushevskaia is probably the only writer who has ever made a poet clean up her mother’s excrement). One day, Anna returns home traumatized by her decision to leave her own mother in an old folks’ home, only to discover that Alena has left, taking the children with her. Petrushevskaia’s texts deal in shortages and dead ends instead of victories and radiant futures. The hopelessness is manifest in “The Cycle,” where on a Sunday evening an educated young woman visits a casual acquaintance to listen to stories of her sexual exploits. There is nothing else to do, other than go to a dull movie—no horizons to aspire to, no challenges to face. There is no hint of a public life, no hope for that broader range of thoughts that enveloped and energized so many lonely individuals in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The narrowness of horizons, already apparent in Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin, reaches its apogee in Petrushevskaia. Her women lack civic, political, and cultural awareness: an ironic comment on the hypertrophy of political and “cultural” education in the USSR. In those rare moments when then they are involved in matters of state, as is the KGB informer in “Ave Maria, Mommy” [“Ave Mariia, mamochka”], they occupy the lowest rung of the ladder, unable to understand what is going on, and easily revert to the world view they received in childhood from their religious (or merely superstitious) relatives. The shrinkage of novelistic space as well as postcolonial sadness are conveyed by Petrushevskaia’s favorite technique, an internal monologue of a moderately intelligent female, who narrates her own and her friends’ musings in a skaz -like way. Petrushevskaia’s stories and plays are short, in contrast to the lengthy novels which imperial Russia produced in great abundance. There is no similarity whatever to the Village Writers, whose nationalistic fervor and didacticism are poles apart from Petrushevskaia’s defiant lack of interest in the

public square. Like a surgeon who carefully excises all traces of a tumor from a patient’s body, she excises from her narratives the problems that are at the center of Rasputin’s, Belov’s, Solzhenitsyn’s, and Astafev’s attention. Her heroines pay zero attention to Mother Russia, rodina, otechestvo, tribal survival, and the like, not to speak of communist propaganda. The thoroughness with which these subjects are eliminated from narrative consciousness is an act of civic courage on the writer’s part: the Russian state has traditionally rewarded those who injected the worship of the rodina into their works, and it has provided disincentives for those who did not. Unlike some Russian writers of lesser talent, Petrushevskaia has not garnered many prizes, and she has not been rewarded with large print runs by the state-owned publishing houses. 13 The waning of empires becomes evident when Others are pushed (or push themselves) to the center of the stage or when they emerge from the shadows, in which they were ignored or misread. By showing a devolution of Russian women from a potentially proimperial force into a group totally out of touch with the powerful state, Petrushevskaia is the first to begin to deconstruct what Robert Conquest has called the last empire. 14 In order to survive, empires need enthusiasm, optimism, self-assurance, and a belief in their own invincibility and permanence. A reader of Pushkin’s poetry or Lev Tolstoi’s prose absorbs such attitudes in large doses, a condition that shapes his or her perception of nineteenth-century Russia. Even the failed socialist-realist novels, which extolled Soviet greatness, provided the pabulum necessary for keeping acceptance of the Soviet state at a reasonably high level. But a reader of Petrushevskaia’s miniature texts is taught to decouple Russianness from political power and to accept Russianness without power, a recipe no Russian writer had offered before her. Petrushevskaia’s texts bring the Russian imperial adventure to an artistic closure. They adumbrate the distress and disappointment that tend to accompany decolonization.

In 1995, in an article attempting to deconstruct what he called “the Soviet discourse,” the Russian semiotician S. Medvedev remarked that while the discourse of power has been characteristic of many cultures, in Russia the appropriation of language for political purposes has been all-inclusive and many-leveled. As Soviet power went into decline, the Russian language was left with a baggage of concepts and expressions that had lost all connection with reality. Now, a new way of speaking has to be invented on the ruins of the Soviet newspeak (novoiaz). The big words are crumbling through misuse; a return to very primitive and fundamental forms of speech is in order. 15 In her radical refusal to notice the make-believe world of Soviet discourse, Petrushevskaia seems to have followed Medvedev’s prescription avant la lettre. Valeriia Novodvorskaia dared to be even more explicit than Petrushevskaia in rejecting Russian imperial self-consciousness. Here is what she wrote in the Russian biweekly Novoe vremia in 1996: We have never understood them, and we will never understand them, because the full do not comprehend the hungry. .. . We have always had bushels of geography. ... We have always had a surplus of people, land, fossil fuels, soldiers, special services, bureaucrats, police. . . . But they kept dreaming feverishly about their tiny shred of land. They dreamed that they would hoist a national flag there and would manage their own economy . 16 They are the Chechens and others who have been part of the “Russian” Federation but would like not to remain a part of it. That a Russian writer would offer so generous and eloquent response to their claims is remarkable, given the fact that in the post-Soviet period quite a few Russian writers reverted to the nerv ousness of immature empires that Aleksandr Pushkin’s generation displayed in such abundance. Like Petrushevskaia and Tolstaia, Novodvorskaia is a trailblazer. Like most trailblazers, she does not weigh her words carefully, opting instead for a flamboyant style that has occasioned many a headache among more sedate Russians.

The essay quoted above is a call to imperial disengagement upon which the political establishment of any country would frown, and for which it would punish the writer in ways appropriate to its political culture. Novodvorskaia was not imprisoned, nor was her life endangered by that poetic essay. In 1996 in Moscow, a person with no economic clout was of little interest to the powers that be. But like Petrushevskaia, Novodvorskaia is not a favored intellectual so far as the influential literary and political circles are concerned. In the late 1980s, she was arrested several times and served time in a psychiatric jail (psikhushka ). Such imprisonment had been customary for dissidents in tsarist Russia and in the USSR. When Petr Chaadaev came out with his critique of Russian history, the tsar promptly declared him insane. When Lev Tolstoi began to preach unorthodox political messages, the state likewise tried to present him as insane. The Soviets built hospitals to incarcerate the inakomysliashchie, “those who thought differently.” Within this “default mode” context, the fact that Novodvorskaia’s punishment included a stay in the psikhushka indicates that the late Soviet state considered her brand of political deviation to be rare and dangerous. But in postcommunist Russia, she is free to say what she wishes, as long as she does not try to implement her ideas. In the 1990s, Novodvorskaia was the leader of one of the first political parties in post-Soviet Russia, Demokraticheskii Soiuz. Her book, This Side of Despair [Po tu storonu otchaianiia] (1993), is a political autobiography that, in addition to narrating the story of her own life records her participation in the struggle for political freedom in the Baltic republics, a rare instance of a native Russian helping others secure the right to sovereignty. It was her active and consistent advocacy of liberty for every nation that got Novodvorskaia in trouble with rank-andfile Russian democrats. Her book did not sell, and she remained on the margins of Russian political life. Her infrequent publications are markedly different from what mainstream Russian politicians routinely say. Her high-pitched tone enlivens the journal Novoe vremia, where she has published

her essays. It also shows the desperation of Russia’s democrats, who sometimes lose hope of improving their country. Novodvorskaia’s essay on the Caucasus is a passionate defense of the right of the peoples of the “Russian” Federation to secede. Novodvorskaia points out that “When the Soviet dissidents from the metropolis brought down communism (or perhaps just set it aside), they solved most of their problems. With a few exceptions, they deemed it madness for the dissidents from Russia’s colonies [italics added] to start solving their own particular problems.” 17 No Russian before or after Novodvorskaia has dared to formulate so openly the key problem of the Federation: the fact that even after the fall of the USSR na tions and territories have been locked in the “Russian” Federation against their will, a situation that amounts to colonial captivity. Like certain writings of Petr Chaadaev and Aleksandr Gertsen, Novodvorskaia’s essays are likely to be counted among the milestones that mark changes in Russian national consciousness. Novodvorskaia displays a fine knowledge of the empire’s dealings with its Caucasus subjects. She is respectful of Chechen mythology and of Chechnya’s cultural icons and experiences, just as the world has learned to respect Russian cultural icons and experiences. She condemns Moscow for its devious dealings with Zviad Gamsachurdia, a Georgian patriot and the first president of free Georgia after the Soviet Union’s downfall. She comes close to accusing the FSK (the KGB’s successor) of murdering him. She points out that the Muslim leader of Chechnya and the Christian leader of Georgia were good friends, thus challenging the empiregenerated view that religious hatreds prevail in the Caucasus. “In life and in death, Dzhokhar Dudaev and Zviad Gamsachurdia are the source of unbearable irritation for the Moscow intelligentsia, the KGB, the FSK, the FSB, for President Yeltsin’s administration, and for other power structures,” she writes. Their friendship flew in the face of Moscow propaganda that accused the Muslim nations of extremism, just as empire-induced privation and misery were driving

. these nations into the arms of the Muslim fundamentalists. Novodworskaia warns that those who have called the secessionists “bandits” run the danger of following Stalin’s path: “It will become necessary to murder everyone, even women and children, so that, in Stalin’s terms, no ‘avengers for the fathers’ grow up.” She realizes that the Russian political culture cannot yet accommodate a radical reversal of state policy, and so she turns to poetry, to Vladimir Vysotskii’s songs in particular, to make her point: “Throw everything overboard that smells of blood, / and know that the price is not too high.” Galina Starovoitova, murdered in 1998, had added her political presence and her convictions to that weak chorus; she too believed that, to use Adam Michnik’s words, “a nation that oppresses other nations couldn’t be free.” 18 Novodvorskaia’s story does not have a happy ending. In her zeal to effect change, and owing to hyperbole to which she has always been prone, she has crossed the line separating debate from extremism. Barely two years after her magnificent essay on Russia’s minorities and within a few months of Russia’s economic collapse in August 1998, she took a stance in disfavor of Vorkuta miners on strike in protest against nonpayment of wages and projected closings of unprofitable coal mines. Closings of money-losing pits have been part of the painful process of economic restructuring that Russia has had to undertake in order to start growing, but from the standpoint of workers, pit closings equaled starvation. There were no other jobs in subarctic Vorkuta, and resettlement of workers in the European mainland has not been seriously contemplated by the government. Lacking effective leadership, the Vorkuta miners have been all alone in their fight for survival. In her Novoe vremia article on the subject, Novodvorskaia remarked that perhaps those who could not adapt themselves to new circumstances should be shot, so that the remainder (if only a minority) could live in a new, splendid, and democratic Russia. 19 While it goes without saying that she did not literally advocate shooting workers, her rhetoric

smacked of the old Russian extremism that goes back to Dmitrii Pisarev, Sergei Nechaev (especially the Catechism of the Revolutionary, written in 1869), and Lenin. This and other shrill texts have not endeared Novodvorskaia to any political group, and her political and intellectual future is uncertain. Writers like Petrushevskaia and (with the above caveats) Novodvorskaia suggest that conquering and holding on to foreign lands for Moscow’s benefit has to be abandoned. The Russian people cannot sustain it any longer. Indeed, they themselves have split into Russia proper and the “white colonies” of Siberia and the Far East. Straddling Europe and Asia, the Federation comprises too many ethnic and territorial groups, who are heirs to too many diverse histories, cultures, economies, memories, and interests. No male Russian writer has ever dared to say that the “Russian” Federation is too vast and diverse to be manageable under one government located in Moscow. Writing in opposition to the empire, undoing its imaginative command, as Petrushevskaia has done, is part of the slippage of confidence within a Federation that has never been entirely sure of its identity. The women writers’ voices are too feeble to make an instant difference in a society that has been dominated by male voices, a society that does not yet fully want to discover its colonialist dimension. Postcolonial consciousness still has a long way to go in Russia. But permission to narrate has been obtained, or rather wrenched, from the literary establishment by “those quintessential Others,” Russian women writers. By showing how the empire has failed women, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, in particular, deserves to be called the first postcolonial Russian writer.

NOTES 1. P. Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1976). 2. Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3. Helena Goscilo, “Paradigm Lost? Contemporary Women's Fiction,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, edited by Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), 220. m 4. Valeriia Novodvorskaia, “Throw Everything Overboard That Smells of Blood, Novoe vremia, September f996' Translated by Steven Clancy, Sarmatian Review, 17, no. 3 (September 1997), 480. Subsequent quotations are taken from this translation. 5. Russia Today, 28 July 1998. 6. Helena Goscilo, The Explosive World of Tatyana N. Tolstaya's Fiction (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 7. “Teper 1 ona kak by dlia menia umerla, a mozhet byt', ona i na samom dele umerla, khotia za etot mesiats nikogo v nashem dome ne khoronili.” Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Khar'kov and Moscow: Folio and TKO Ast, 1996), 7. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. 8’. Agence France-Presse, 29 November 1998. 9. “Russia: A Country Study,” Library of Congress site at http://lcweb2.loc.gOv/frd/cs/rutoc.html#ru0064; Statisticheskoe obozrenie: ezhekvartal'nyi zhurnal, no. 1/28 (1999); and Paul Goble,

“Democracy and Development,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2 August 1999. 10. Agence France-Presse, 29 November 1998. 11. W. E. Harkins, Dictionary of Russian Literature (Patterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), 385. 12. Petrushevskaia, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1,338. 13. Goscilo, 219-21. 14. Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986). 15. S. Medvedev, “SSSR: Dekonstruktsiia teksta (k 77-letiiu sovetskogo diskursa),” Chernyshev, Inoe, vol. 3, 321. 16. Novodvorskaia, “Throw Everything Overboard That Smells of Blood,” 480-84; also V. Kaganskii, “Sovetskoe prostranstvo: konstruktsiia i destruktsiia,” in Chernyshev, Inoe, vol. 1, 89-130. 17. Conquest. 18. New York Review of Books, 14 January 1999. 19. Novoe vremia, 30 November 1998.1 thank my colleague Michael Bemstam of the Hoover Institution for pointing this out to me. %

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1

Index Abdurashidaw, Razzaq, 123. Adam,I.,50n, 223. Adomo, Theodore, 13n. Akhmatova, Anna, 201. Akhunava, Etibar, 123. Aleksei Mikhailovich, tsar, 54, 156, 161. Aleksin, Rear Admiral V. I., 124,125. Alexander I, tsar, 55,56,66,73,91, 95, 101, 104,105, 113, 155. Alexander II, tsar, 86, 111. Aliger, Margarita, 169, 176. Allworth, Edward A., vi, 12n, 114, 117, 125n,126n,223. alphabet change (from Arabic or Latin to Cyrillic, or vice versa), 1920, 165,194n. Altstadt, Audrey L., 12n, 223. Anderson, Benedict, 6,11, 13n, 223. Anisimov, Evgenii, 17. anti-Semitism, 138, 175. Arendt, Hannah, 5In, 194n. Armenians and Armenia, 20, 80, 84n. Armstrong, John, 194n. Arx, Jeffrey, 13n.

Aseev, Nikolai N., 19. Ashcroft, Bill, 37,49n. Astafev, Viktor P., 132, 138,142, 144-5,151n,152n,197n, 217,223. Austen, Jane, 33,63,96,98, 120, 133. Australians and Australia, 39, 138, 148. Averintsev, S. S., 35. Azhaev, Vasilii N., 43. Badretdinov, Sabirzyan, 48n, 119, 126n, 223. Balzac, Honore de, 87, 89. Baranovich, Lazar, 54. Baron, Salo W., 13n, 223. Bazylow, Ludwik, 81n, 223. Beckett, Samuel, 207. Belarusians and Belarus, 16,42,74, 148,165,166-180, 189, 192n. Belinskii, Vissarion G., 71,72,79, 83n. Belov, Vasilii I., 217. Belyi, Andrei, 21,55,204. Benningsen, Alexandre, 83n. Berdiaev, Nikolai, 50n, 223. Bemstam, Michael, viii, 126n. Besanqcon, Alain, 12n. Bettelheim, Bruno, 180—181,196n. Bhabha, Homi, 36,37, 38, 39,49n,

50n,69,83n,118,150, 223. Billington, James H., 190,223. Blok, Aleksandr A., 76, 88,204. Boehmer, Elleke, 11,14n, 224. Bronze Horseman, The, 76-9. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 52n. Bulgakov, Mikhail A., 215. Bulgarin, Faddei, 21. Bunin, Ivan A., 17,47n, 224. Buriats and Buriatia, 133, 134, 142. Camus, Albert, 109-110, 111, 114, 115. 234 Index Cancer Ward, 115-124, 126n, 205, 229. Cannadine, David, 8,25,44. Canovan, Margaret, 5, 6,13n,49n, 86, 224. Carlyle, Thomas, 78. Carrere-d’Encausse, Helene, 12n, 120, 126n, 224. Catherine II (the Great), 17,26,42,43, 54,74,97. Caucasus, the, nations of, 1,20,28, 53-74,80,85,113, 136, 169,205, 219.220. Central Asia, nations of, 1, 19,23, 85, 105, 111-115,116-125,167,205. Central Europe, nations of, 6,13n, 19, 22,30, 102-103,110, 188-9. Chaadaev, Petr la., 219,220. Chechens and Chechnya, 3,4,9,10,

44,51n, 52n, 72,74,140, 191,200, 218.220. Chekhov, Anton P.,28,45, 115,171, 204-205,208. Chemiaev, General Mikhail, 111,112. Chemiavsky, Michael, 103, 105, 108n, 224. Chernyshev, S.B., 49n, 51n, 197n, 224. Chew, Allen F„ 28-29,30, 31,82n, 113, 224. Children of the Arbat, 136-142, 229. Christian, R.F., 107n, 224. Churchill, Sir Winston, 27. Clancy, Steven, viii, 221n, 227. Clyman, T.W., 224. Cohen, Stephen, 24,48n, 164, 194n. colonial dependency, 40-41,80. colonialism, 1,2, 6,9,39, 163, 164; definition of, 32; internal, 16,20, 165; Western, 46. colonialism, Russian, 15,18,22, 24-25,323,35,38,40,45, 63,71, 111, 115,118,133,141,163-64, 165,190,213. colonialist discourse, 43,44. colonies, “white,” 1,39—40, 129, 148. Conquest, Robert, 83n, 84n, 126n, 218, 222n,224. Conrad, Joseph, 33,43,63,65, 139, 150. Corneille, Pierre, 94. Cromer, Lord Evelyn Baring, 43. Curtin, Philip D., 13n, 224. Curtius, Ernst, 157,158,193n, 194n, 224. v Custine, the Marquis de, 27,49n. Czapski, Jozef, 48n, 111, 224.

Czechs and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, 8, 10, 18, 104, 134, 167, 215. Czubaty, Jaroslaw, 49n, 8In, 224. Dqbrowska, Maria, 50n, 224. Dagestanis and Dagestan, 4, 16. Dalberg-Acton, Lord J. E. E., 5,12n, 224. Dallin, Alexander, 164, 194n. Davies, Norman, vii, 30, 49n,50n, 83n,84n,107n, 224. “default mode” of Russian discourse, 76-77,145,176,219. Derrida, Jacques, 10,37. Derzhavin, Gavriil R., 55,77. Deutsch, Karl, 6, 13n, 224. De Zepentek, Tdtosy, 165, 224. Dickens, Charles, 33,85,96. Dobroliubov, Nikolai A., 71,73,79. domesticity, 95-96. Domostroi, 53,54, 81n, 161, 194n, 224. Dostoevskii, Fedor M., 18, 22,29, 33, 43,45,72,90,99,104,115,125n, 139, 185. Durkheim, Emile, 3. Durova, Nadezhda, 95, 107n, 224. Eastern Europe, nations of, 5, 13n, 22, 30,110,187. Eastern Orthodoxy and humor, 159-162. Eikhenbaum, Boris M., 79-80,83n, 84n, 227.

Eliot, T. S., 80. epistemological systems, 38; Enlightenment epistemology, 3,4,10-11, 32.41, 185; epistemology in Russia, 41-^12,186; medieval epistemology, 35.41. Ermak (Yermak), 136. Ermolov (Yermolov), General Aleksei P.,57,60-61,64, 113, 136, 140, 169,228. Estonians and Estonia, 16, 18,21,134, 165, 173,183, 192. ethnie, 8,98. Index 235 Evenki (Evenks, Tungus), 119, 139, 140,151n. Fanon, Frantz, ll,42,43,50n,225. Fennell, John, 125n, 193n,225. Fichte, J. G.,7. Filippov, A., 49n. Finansovaia gazeta, 168,175,181, 182. Finns and Finland, 18,21,61,76,78, 165,166,174,181-83, 188, 194n. Fisher, Alan, 12n, 225. Flaubert, Gustave, 62, 82n, 87, 89, 124, 225.

Fletcher, Giles, 16,58. Fonvizin, Denis I., 77,94. Ford, Peter, 23,43,49n, 51 n, 225. Forster, E. M.,43. Foucault, Michel, 10. Frank, Rebecca, 49n, 124,126n, 229. Freud, Sigmund, 69. Froude, J. A., 13n. Fuller, William C., Jr., 51n, 225. Furtseva, Ekaterina A., 201. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2,12n, 225. Gandhi, Leela, 5,6, 11, 12n, 38,40, 48n,49n,50n,225. Garrard, John, viii, 125n, 225. Georgians and Georgia, 9,18, 20,59, 66,82n,84n,85,192,220. Germans and Germany, 6,7,9,21,30, 40,146,165,166,167,168,176. Gerome, Jean Leon, 69. Gertsen (Herzen), Aleksandr I., 220. Gippius, Zinaida N., 201. Glavatskii, M.I., 196n, 197n, 225. Glazunov, Il'ia S., 132,150n, 227. Glinka, Mikhail I., 77,175,195n. Goble, Paul, 12n, 20,52n, 225. Gogol', Nikolai V., 22,66, 89,99,132, 137. Gombrowicz, Witold, 70, 83n, 22£. Gorbacheva (Gorbacheva), Raisa, 145,186. Gorchakov, Prince Aleksandr M., 92, 116. Goscilo, Helena, 22In, 222n, 225. Graham, Sheelagh, vi, 125n, 225. Grant, S. A., 107n, 225.

Grech, Nikolai I., 45. Greek (Eastern Rite) Catholic Church, 42,74,85-6. Gross, Jan T„ 166, 179, 191n, 194n, 195n,196n,225. Gulag, the, 24, 135, 155, 172. Gumilev, Nikolai S., 112-113, 125n, 147,204,225. Gushchin, Lev N., 17. Gustafson, Thane, 67-68, 83n. Harkins, William E., 215,222n. Hastings, Adrian, 86,225. Haxthausen, Baron August von, 18, 47n,67,83n,225. Hayes, C. J. H., 13n. Hechter, Michael, 20, 39,48n, 226. Hegel, Georg W. F., 11,41,56. Heimat, 8. Hemingway, Ernest, 123. Herder, J. G., 13n, 226. Hero of Our Time, 68-74,227. Hitler, Adolf, 114, 163, 167, 177,189. Hobsbawn, Eric J., 5, 8,12n, 13n, 46, 5In,226. Hobson, J.A., 13n, 226.

Holquist, Michael, 97,226. Huntington, Samuel, 19,90. imperialism, 45,77, 109, 112; definition of, 32. imperial space, 88-89,122-123, 201-205. in-between peripheral ity, see De Zepentek, Totosy Irish, the, and Ireland, 18, 19, 39. Isakovskii, Mikhail V., 172. Ivan IV, tsar (the Terrible), 16, 162, 188. Jelavich, Barbara, 190. Jews and Judaism, 74, 129, 147, 150, 167,170,175,179. Johnson, Paul, 12n, 226. Journey to Arzrum during the 1828 Campaign, 60-67. Kafka, Franz, 29. Kapuscinski, Ryszard,49n, 117,126n, 130,226. Karamzin, Nikolai M., 16,55-57, 81n, 113,194n, 226. Karelians and Karelia, 44, 165,166, 183. 236 Index Kataev, Valentin P., 170. Kaufman, General K., von, 111,112, 114. Kazakhs and Kazakhstan, 12n, 52n, 85,

111.116.117.134.210. Kedourie, Elie, 5, 12n, 226. Keenan, Edward L., 16,47n, 226. Kelly, Catriona, 221n, 226. Kennan,George,23,33,43,48n, 83n, 194n,226. Kennan, George (Sr.), 131-132, 150n, 226. Khabarov, Erofei P., 136,144. Khakhamada, Irina, 203. Kheraskov, Mikhail M., 55,93. Khodasevich, Vladislav, 21. Khomiakov, Aleksei S., 104. Kierkegaard, Sdren, 90. Kieman, V.G., 57, 82n, 226. Kipling, Rudyard, 62,76, 82n, 99, 123, 226. Kohn, Hans, 12n, 226. Kolakowski, Leszek, 13n, 22,48n, 227. Kosciuszko, Thaddeus, 113. Kossuth, Lajos (Louis), 7,13n, 225. Kross, Jaan, 18,47n,227. Kucharzewski, Jan, 3,12n, 227. Kundera, Milan, 18,47n, 227. Kutuzov, Field Marshal Mikhail I., 100,101. Latvians and Latvia, 12n,21,134,165, 173.183.210. Lazari, Andrzej de, 227.

Lednicki, Waclaw, 102, 107n, 227. Lenin, Vladimir I. (Ul'ianov), 78,92, 110,169,186. Leonov, Leonid M., 145. Lermontov, Mikhail Iu., 28,53,65, 68-74,79,82n,84n,139,200, 227. Leskov, Nikolai S., 132. Likhachev, Dmitrii S., vii, 45,51n, 81n,155-156,158,160,162,163, 193n,227. List, Friedrich, 3,12n, 229. Literaturnaia gazeta, 35, 166, 167, 170,171,172,173,177, 180,181, 195n. Lithuanians and Lithuania, 9,16, 20, 21,36,74,102,134, 148, 165,168, 173,183,192. Live and Remember, 133, 142. Lotman, Iurii M., 193n. Lyotard, Jean-Fran$ois, 106. Maistre, Joseph de, 27. Marianne, 8. Marx, Karl, 3, 12n; Marxism, 22, 36, 166,186. Massa, Isaac, 53, 81n, 130, 227. Maude, Aylmer, 64, 107n, 230. Maupassant, Guy de, 87.

McMillin, Arnold, vii, viii, 193n. Medvedev, S., 218, 222n. Medvedev, Zhores, 124. merriment and sinfulness, medieval, 156-158; Muscovite, 158-162. Michelet, Jules, 64,92. Michnik, Adam, 220. Mickiewicz, Adam, viii, 7, 13,78-79, 84n,127n,227. Miller, David, 86,227. Miliukov, Pavel M., 77. Molnar, Thomas, 107n,227. Molotov, Viacheslav M., 163, 165, 174,177,181,182, 189,195n; Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, 163,176, 177,189-190. monumental ism, Russian, 202-204. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 50n, 227. Moser, Charles A., 83n, 227. Mote, Victor, 131, 134, 138, 150n, 151n,227. Motyl, Alexander J., 194n, 227. Murav, Harriet, 124. Muscovy, 16, 17, 30,74, 113, 156, 158-160,187.

Napoleon, 76, 87, 88,91,95,99, 100-101, 103, 104, 105; Napoleonic invasion, 56,59, 88, 102. nationalism, 1,2,3,6,7,11; defensive, 9; expansive, 9; myth-symbol complex of, 7, 8,9; nationalism and freedom, 9-10; nationalism and literacy, 10; nationalism and literature, 8,10-11; nationalism and war, 8; Russian nationalism, 163, 164, 166, 176,180-181. nationhood, 7, 8,9,35, 86. Nechaev, Sergei G., 221. Nekrasov, Viktor P., 88. New Criticism, 38. Nicholas I, tsar, 18,42,67,73,79, 105, 106,154,155. Nicholas II, tsar, 45,79. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 78. Norwid, Cyprian K., 75. Novodvorskaia, Valeriia I., 46,51 n, 218-221,222n,227. Novoe vremia, 218,219,220,221n, 222n. Noyes, George R., viii, 84n. Ogonek, 17,24—25,35,45. Olcott, Martha B., 12n, 227. “Oleszkiewicz,” 78-79. “Orientalist” methodology in scholarship, 31-33, 62,63,178. Orlov, A., 196n, 197n, 227.

Paksoy, H.B., 125n, 126n, 227. Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, 166, 168, 183, 196n,228. Paskievich, Field Marshal Ivan F., 60, 61,76. Pasternak, Boris L., 212. Pastukhov, Vladimir, 45,51n, 228. Paul I, tsar, 113. Peter I (the Great), 26, 28, 54,59, 77-78, 124, 135, 153, 154, 155, 185. Petrovich, Aleksei, 82n, 228. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila S., 73, 8In, 199-217,228. Pikul', Valentin S., 207. Pipes, Richard, 12n, 23,48n, 49n, 106n,160,193n, 228. Pisarev, Dmitrii I., 96, 107n. Plakans, Andrejs, 12n, 228. Pogodin, Mikhail P., 56. Poles and Poland, 9,18,42,54,74-79, 102,103, 134,147,165,166-179, 190; polonization, 184. Polevoi, Nikolai A., 56. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 28, 74,97. . ' postcoloniai studies, 31—41, 106.

postcolonial literary strategies, 36,37. Pravda, 18, 166—170,172—184,195n, 196n,228. Primakov, Evgenii, 44,47. Pushkin, Aleksandr S., 18,26,28,43, 53, 57-58,60-67,76-79,80,82n, 84n,86,94,96,107n,112,113, 125n,188,200,219,228. Putin, Vladimir, 4. Putnam, P., 49n, 228. Quorbashi rebellion, 40, 116. Ra'anan, Uri, 12n, 44,51n, 228. Rabelais, Francois, 157. Racine, Jean, 94. Radishchev, Aleksandr N.,74. Radwan, Marian, 50n, 228. Rambaud, Alfred, 174, 195n, 196n. Ranger, Terence, 13n,49n. Ransom, John Crowe, 123. Rasputin, Valentin G., viii, 22, 130, 132-138,140, 142-144,151n, 155, 217,228. Reim, Carl, 146. ressentiment, 8,13n, 18,32,92,229. Rhodes, Cecil, 121.

Riabikin, C., 196n, 197n, 228. Riasanovsky, Nichol as, 2,49n, 189-90,197n,228. Richardson, Samuel, 94. Rodina!otechestvo, mythology of, 8, 34,39,71,89,99, 100, 101,122, 132,145-146,204, 217. Romains, Jules, 46. Romanenko, A., 196n, 197n,228. Romanians and Romania, 77, 163, 165, 174,183-184,189,190. Romanticism, 38,39,55,94. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse, 12n, 228. Rothberg, Abraham, 110,111,125n, 228. Rothschild, Joseph, 194n, 228. Russia, invasions of, 30—31; military history of, 28,45,165, 185; selfrepresentation of, 41 —4-2,46-47, 79-80,86-89,91,98,106,139, 153-156, 181-182. “Russia,” terminological ambiguities of, 16-18,44. Russian empire, 10,15-16,24,30, 32-33, 39,41,43,44,46-47,79,97, 123,129-130,146,153-154,163, 185-187,192,200,213. Russian postcoloniai discourse, 39, 199-221. Russians, 16—18,28, 29, 30,41,58,79, 118,168,187,188.

Rybakov, Anatolii N., 28,138-142, 151n,202,229. 238 Index Said, Edward, 5,11, 12n, 20, 31-36, 51n,69,81,97,103, 106n, 107n, 109-110,126n,127n, 133, 141,229. Scammell. Michael, 124, 152n. Seton-Watson, Hugh, 42, 50n, 82n, 83n,107n,125n,229. Shafer, Boyd A., 13,229. Shakespeare, William, 77,92. Shalamov, Varlaam T., 111. Shengeli, Georgii, 50n. Shirer, William R„ 190,229. Shishkov, Aleksandr S., 93,94. Shklovskii, Viktor B., vii, 153-155, 163,193n, 229. Sholokhov, Mikhail A., 29. Siberians and Siberia, 24,29, 44,53, 54, 130-145,149, 167,210. Simmons, Ernest, 75, 84n, 106n, 107n, 229. skaz, 132,145,151n. Skobelev, General Mikhail D., 112, 169. Slavophiles, 56,91. Slovaks and Slovakia, 8.

Slowacki, Juliusz, 7,50n, 131,229. Smirnov, S.G., 196n, 197n,229. Smith, Anthony D., 7, 12n, 13n, 86, 87, 93,99,106n, 229. Snyder, Louis L., 13n, 229. socialist realism, 34. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., vi, 20,22, 24,28,31,43,48n,49n,50n, 110, 111,113,115-125, 126n, 140, 147-149,152n,201,204,207,217, 229. Soviet nation, the, 8. Soyinka, Wole, 148. Spivak, Gayatri, 10, 14n, 36,38,39, 48n,50n,70,83n, 229. Stalin (Dzugashvili), Iosif V., 34, 80, 110,121,163,164, 168, 169, 172, 175,189,220. Starovoitova, Galina, 8, 220. stateless nations, 10. Stein, Gertrude, 123. Stent, Angela, 67-68, 83n. Sternberg, General R. von Ungem, 117. Stokes, Anthony, 160, 193n,225. Stolypin, Petr A., 147-148. Strakhov, Nikolai N., 88,96,106n, 229.

Suchanek, Lucjan, vii, 229. Sumarokov, Aleksandr P., 55,94. 'Suvorov, General Aleksandr V., 60, 169. Swearingen, Rodger, 12n, 229. Szporluk, Roman, 3, 12n, 74, 84n, 229. Tatars and Tatarstan, 19,20, 118, 121, 134,136,210,211. terminological appropriation (as a byproduct of colonialism), 25, 33. Terras, Victor, 83n, 230. Thackeray, W.M., 85,87,96. Thompson, Ewa M., 12n, 49n, 50n, 125n,150n, 193n,230. Tiffin, Helen, 39,49n, 50n, 223,230. Timofeev, L.I., 153, 230. Tiutchev, Fedor I., 18,72,77, 90. Tolstaia, Tatiana N., 208-209,219, 230. Tolstoi, Lev N., 28,43,44, 64,67, 82n, 85-106, 107n, 218, 230. “To the Slanderers of Russia,” 76. Traugutt, Romuald, 10. Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 8. Trifonov, Iurii V., 43.

Trubachev, O.N., 49n, 230. Turgenev, Ivan S., 28,42^43,50n, 64, 71,98,208,230. Turks and Turkic population, 20,21, 58, 62,84n,116, 139. Tvardovskii, Aleksandr T., 173, 176. Ukrainians and Ukraine, 9, 16,19,21, 42,48n, 54,74,97, 137, 148, 165, 166-181, 183-184,187-188,190, 200 . Ulam, Adam, 163-164, 194n, 195n. Ushakov, V., 35,49n. Ustrialov, Nikolai G., 56. Uzbeks and Uzbekistan, 40-41,85, 110,111,114,115-125,147,200; Uzbek literature, 123. Vakhabov, M., 125n, 230. Valiev, Rimzil, 48n, 125n, 230. Verdery, Katherine, 13n, 230. Verdi, Giuseppe, 36,103. Vermeer, Jan, 95-96. Vernadsky, George, 2, 189, 197n,230. Vigny, Alfred de, 89,91,107n, 230. Village Writers, the, 35,217. Volkischer Beobachter, 168,177, 195n. Voltaire, 26. Von Stackelberg, General G. K., 21. Vysotskii, Vladimir, 220.

Walcott, Derek, 148. Wallenberg, Raoul, 4, 230. War and Peace, 85-106,205,230. Whitmore, Brian, 191, 197n,230. Wilczek, Piotr, viii, 231. Wilson, President Woodrow, 6-7. Yakuts (Iakuts) and Yakutia, 139, 141. Yanov, Alexander, 124. Yeltsin (Eltsin), Boris N., 45,51n, 138, 191,192,231. Yergin, Daniel, 67-68, 83n, 231. Yugoslavs and Yugoslavia, 8. Zeromski, Stefan, 83n. Zotov, Igor', 120,126n,231. E AN

About the Author EWA M. THOMPSON is Professor of Slavic Studies at Rice University. She is the author of several books, and her articles have appeared in such journals as Modem Age and Slavic Review. ISBN 0-313-31311-3

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