Russia Views Itself as Colonized But Refuses to Admit It Still Colonizes Others, Tlostanova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 14 – In a special issue of Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye wnriewly devoted to relations between the post-Soviet world and the post-colonial one, areas that intersect but are not identical, Madina Tlostanova argues that Russian scholars have found it difficult to integrate themselves into international discourse about colonialism and Orientalism.

            On the one hand, given that the fields involved are still dominated in Russia by those trained in Soviet times, the Circassian scholar who teaches at Linköping University in Sweden argues, the predominant view is that their country ceased being an empire in Soviet times (magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2020/1/postkolonialnyj-udel-i-dekolonialnyj-vybor-postsoczialisticheskaya-mediacziya.html).

            And on the other, many Russians see their own country as having been colonized by the West since the end of the 1980s and thus want to apply colonial discourse to a discussion of Russia and Russians even while they reject any possibility of  using its terminology and tools to understand what Russia is doing with its non-Russian peoples.

            If these two limiting factors could be overcome, Tlostanova says, the Russian experience could enrich and be enriched by international discourse about colonialism, de-colonization and Orientalism rather than as now being largely excluded from that discourse both by Russians and by scholars in the West. 

            “The intersect of post-colonial and post-soviet experience,” she continues, “respresents an especially complex, fruitful and beyond the confines of standard post-colonial models, a situation in which Soviet modernity had its own dark colonial side which numerous ethnic groups and peoples suffered through.”

            As Tlostanova points out, “many of us today are at one and  the same time post-socialist and post-colonial others, who have no place on the bright side of global colonialism but who, because of their own colonial-imperial configuration, never will be able to belong to any other locality, native or acquired.”

            The cultural metropolitan center in the USSR and then in Russia undoubtedly continues to exotify and demonize us as (post) colonial others. But its monopoly on the right to be the conductor of modernity has been lost,” and with it, Moscow’s ability to define how people in its still existing colonies view themselves.

            On the periphery of the Russian Federation, “ever more people are refusing to be assimilated Ariels or archaic singers of their native land. Both these extremes in a dangerous way mark an individual in a narrow ethno-centricity which many post-Soviet and post-colonial subjects reject because of the multiplicity or constructed quality of our roots.”

            Both scholars and these people need the terminology and ideas of post-colonial studies outside of Russia, lest they remain locked in a trap not of their own making but from which they cannot easily escape.  And Western students of post-colonialism need to integrate the special features of post-Sovietism in their models.

            That is especially true in one regard, Tlostanova says. “Early post-colonial discourses were largely leftwing and anti-capitalist.” But “the post-socialist trajectory on the contrary was marked from the start by an almost emotion rejection of everything socialist and a bowing down before Western liberal knowledge.”

            More recently, she suggests, “part of the post-socialist activists and scholars have begun to reintegrate the socialist heritage in less negative forms, criticizing the Western infiltration of the post-socialist academy, NGOs, and other institutions involved in the production of knowledge.”