To find new lands, it was not at all necessary to go on long journeys. There was plenty of unused land in Europe itself. Another thing is that it was not easy to develop them, because they are mostly forests and swamps. Forests had to be cut down, swamps had to be drained, and such work was very hard.

And yet, over the course of several centuries, the appearance of Europe has changed. Through the efforts of many generations of peasants, vast territories that were previously completely unsuitable for agriculture were cleared. More arable land means more bread, less danger of famine.

In this internal colonization, peasants were often helped by sovereigns and large lords in general. They exempted villages that had arisen on cleared lands from taxes for a certain period of time. It was beneficial for the lords to have more peasants living in their domains, more land to be cultivated, and more income-generating villages to arise.

Monks also took a serious part in the development of new lands. Monasteries arose, as a rule, in the most remote corners of Europe. A few decades later, around these abbeys there were already well-groomed fields, orchards and vegetable gardens, mills and vineyards. The Cistercian order (from the name of the main monastery - Cistercium) became especially famous for such work. The hard work of the Cistercian monks knew no bounds. They turned the terrible forest wilds into model farms. But the monks did not spare the forces of the dependent peasants.

Cistercian monks are cutting down wood. Miniature (XIII century)

In some parts of Europe, for example in the Netherlands, every piece of land was used for agriculture, but there was still not enough of it. The peasants in those parts even launched an attack on the sea. To protect themselves from floods, they built dams, and sometimes created real islands of stones and debris, on which they later established pastures.

As a result of internal colonization through the labor of many generations, Europe gradually began to acquire an increasingly well-worn appearance.

"Onslaught on the East"

From such overpopulated areas of Europe as the Netherlands and some parts of Germany, a gradual movement of the population began to the East - beyond the Elbe River.

Beyond the Elbe lived Slavic tribes that appeared there after the Germans left there during the Great Migration. The Slavs between the Elbe (Laba) and the Oder (Odra) were pagans. Their state has not yet emerged, although large tribal unions have already appeared. The fate of these Slavic tribes was difficult. From the east, the Kingdom of Poland launched conquest campaigns into their lands every now and then. But even more dangerous was the pressure from the west - from the German princes.

Christian and Arab playing chess. Miniature (XIII century)

Large German lords, both secular and ecclesiastical, really wanted to expand their possessions in the East at the expense of the lands of the Slavic tribes. A struggle began, which took several centuries, to conquer the Slavs between the Elbe and Oder. There was a lot of treachery and cruelty on both sides. The seemingly conquered Slavs rebelled many times and abandoned imposed Christianity. Slavic leaders either led these uprisings or began to support the Germans.

The decisive word in this struggle was said by the peasants, the same ones who went to seek a better life in the lands conquered from the Slavs. German dukes, counts and bishops invited settlers in every possible way, because they understood that the conquered lands still needed to be retained, and for this they needed to be populated. The settlers received a lot of land on good terms and for its sake they were ready to live for many years in the restless German-Slavic borderland.

So the German princes conquered, and the newcomers occupied and held the lands of the Slavic tribes. Many Slavs, as well as Germans, died or fled during these centuries. But many remained and gradually merged with the new settlers, passing on some of their customs to them. Their lands became part of the empire in the same way as once upon a time, after even more stubborn resistance, the lands of the Saxons were included in the power of Charlemagne. In both cases, the conquest was accompanied by the conversion of the conquered to Christianity.

From the 13th century German military colonization also began in the Eastern Baltic states - Prussia and Livonia.

Reconquista

At the opposite end of Europe - the Iberian Peninsula - military colonization was also underway. Back in the 7th-8th centuries. almost the entire peninsula, except for the northern mountainous part, was occupied by the Arabs (or, as they were called in Europe, the Moors). But soon Christians began a centuries-long struggle to reconquer these lands. In Spanish, Reconquista means Reconquest. The Reconquista continued until the end of the 15th century, but the main successes were made in the 11th-13th centuries. This is the same time when the crusaders were rushing to Jerusalem, and German princes and peasants were pushing out the West Slavic tribes. It was as if there was a simultaneous attack in all directions. The Reconquista was not the work of the Spaniards and Portuguese alone - knights from all over Europe went to war with the Moors. The peasants mastered what had been conquered by the sword.

Christians not only fought with the Moors - they learned a lot from them. Islamic culture in the X-XII centuries. was very developed, Arab sages were famous throughout the world. Many Europeans went to Arab Spain for knowledge.

Stages of the Reconquista

Here is just one example of how Europe learned from the Moors. The whole world now uses numbers called Arabic (although they were invented in India). These figures came to Christian Europe, apparently from Spain.

Internal colonization and conquest of Christians in the West and East seemed to “expand” the boundaries of Western Europe. Getting to know other peoples and their customs provided a lot of useful information for European culture.

Questions

1. Show on a map of Europe the main directions of military colonization movements in the Middle Ages.

2. In the old monastic orders - Benedictine and Cluny - the most difficult work was performed by peasants dependent on the monasteries. Did it arise by chance at the very end of the 11th century? Did the Cistercian Order oblige the monks themselves to raise virgin lands?

3. Is it possible to decide who is right and who is wrong in the endless clashes between Germans and Slavs in the 11th-13th centuries?

4. Why were the Europeans unable to hold Palestine, but managed to recapture Spain from the Saracens?

From the Spanish epic “The Song of My Cid” (XII century)

The Spanish heroic epic of Cid is about true events and real people. Its main character is the Spanish knight Rodrigo (Ruy Diaz) (c. 1040-1099), nicknamed the Cid (Lord) by the Arabs. Ruy Diaz, at the head of a detachment of desperate warriors, successfully fought with the Moors, either as a vassal of the Spanish king, or even at his own peril and risk. Sometimes he went into the service of one of the noble and rich Moors. As a result of his campaigns and raids, a significant part of Spain found itself again under Christian rule.

(Campeador (“warrior”) is the nickname of Sid.)

(Bivar is the name of Sid's castle.)

(Alcazar - in Spain the name of the city citadel, the Kremlin.)

(The Cid and his vassals were expelled from Castile by King Alfonso VI, but were later forgiven for their victories over the Moors.)

(Minaya is Sid's relative and most loyal ally.)

Questions

1. Show on the map in which region of Europe the poem takes place.

2. Try to determine what kind of people joined Sid’s squad and for what purposes?

3. Why does Cid, exiled by the king, send him gifts, and then even give him the recaptured Valencia?

4. Is it only the incredible generosity of Sid that explains his desire to give houses and lands even to those who did not participate in the siege of Valencia? By the way, where did Sid get these houses and lands?

5. Why is Sid so strict towards those who want to leave the conquered city?

6. Where do you think Bishop Jerome might have come from?

7. Why does Sid create a bishopric without even asking permission from the church authorities?

8. Why did Sid need to call his family to the city that had just been conquered from the Arabs?

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internal colonization of America, internal colonization of Mars
- settlement and economic development of empty outlying lands of the country.

It is quite legitimate to include here also colonization by the ruling elite of their own people and territories for the purpose of their own maximum enrichment and usurpation of power. This can also include countries under totalitarian regimes, ignoring the principles of democratic government and society.

Internal colonization can develop and intensify, either quite quickly and obviously as a result of, for example, a coup d'etat, or gradually and secretly, continuing to declare and promote the principles and ideals of a democratic state, and even follow them in small things that are not essential for the authorities. In matters affecting the distribution of income and resources, such a government mainly acts in its own interests and to the detriment of the interests of its people. a number of countries with the most backward levels of development (as in Africa), internal colonization exists historically, due to the suppression of social development factors. Any of the internal colonization options makes it easy to detect in your system the presence of at least several of the following signs:

• State power strives to establish total control in all areas of society, increasingly deforming them to serve its own interests; government structures and their affiliates are reaching unprecedented, hypertrophied sizes and numbers.
• Most areas of life in society and sectors of the economy show a steady trend towards degradation, except for the system of power and public administration itself, including the structures serving them, incl. power. Colonizers, both external and internal, are always attracted by the development of the most popular extractive industries, since it is the large-scale sale of such raw materials that provides them with one of the main sources of quick and easy personal enrichment.
• The authorities do not spend effort and money on any long-term projects and goals that do not bring them quick and maximum personal enrichment. The constant degradation of all systems of society and the economy leads to an increase in public outrage and protests. The most important task of the government, immediately following the task of enriching itself, is the task of creating an ideology aimed at instilling in society a false picture of circumstances that supposedly testify to the infallibility of the government and the exclusive guilt of certain numerous enemies of the state for all ills. For these purposes, the government uses all the latest tools and technologies to influence the consciousness of the individual, distorts and manipulates objective information and data, cultivates the idea of ​​national uniqueness and superiority, inflates “patriotism” up to its transformation into outright nationalism and chauvinism, and cultivates society, the idea of ​​growing hostility towards the country and the state, both outside and inside it, respectively, to the awareness of the need to support any actions of the authorities, even the most harsh and undemocratic, since we are talking about protecting the country from external and internal threats from her many mythical enemies.

• The ideology of such a government is always false, anti-people, reactionary and does not withstand any public criticism. Accordingly, for its effective promotion and introduction into society, the authorities establish strict censorship and control over all significant media.
• All institutions of the state, including the security forces and the judiciary, are aimed at the exclusive protection of the authorities and their entourage. Accordingly, without being part of them, any business and organization must be prepared for any forceful actions by the authorities, up to and including complete destruction or expropriation. The likelihood of this increases exponentially after the following signs appear in the structure: an attractive amount of working capital for government structures, starting from approximately 10 million rubles, violation of tax minimization schemes tacitly permitted by the state, excess of the amounts of allowable savings, public criticism of the authorities. Naturally, in such a situation, most of their own entrepreneurs prefer not to develop, so as not to arouse the interest of someone from the authorities and their circle. Of the foreign businessmen, those whose moral principles are close to the principles of the power of the colonialists will go to such a market, which allows them to reach documented agreements, although an agreement with such power is always illusory and can be violated by it at any moment. Those whose business does not require significant investments will also go (for example, consulting, auditing, design, suppliers of any goods, working on an advance payment basis, etc.), and the resulting profit is immediately transferred to another country. In the absence of a favorable investment climate and really working government support programs, incentives and guarantees, there are usually several industries visible that, if not developing, are at least not degrading, thanks to large-scale government support. As mentioned above, such favorites of the authorities are enterprises that extract the most in-demand raw materials, enterprises of any line of activity, but owned and/or controlled by persons whom the authorities trust, a few executors of government and military orders. Such a focus on raw materials and limited interests of the authorities unmistakably indicates the colonial orientation of the government’s policy towards its own country. In addition, at best, you can see some enterprises whose indicators indicate their positive development dynamics. The totality of such successful enterprises ensures the fragmented development of the economy in such sectors as trade, finance, and light industry. Such industries, which are most important for the development of the economy, belonging to group “A” and ensuring the production of means of production, are either completely destroyed, or, at best, are maintained at such a low technological level that their products are completely uncompetitive for export and are in demand only closed own market, or in the markets of equally underdeveloped countries. Naturally, the further use of such backward means of production is guaranteed to lead to the production of equally uncompetitive products with their help.
• Industrial enterprises are either nationalized or criminally confiscated in favor of owners close to the authorities. New owners, as a rule, immediately begin to sell the enterprise as a whole, or in parts. These processes lead to significant destruction of industry, or at least to its stagnation.
• The long life of society under the influence of such colonial and anti-democratic policies and ideology inevitably leads to a corresponding massive deformation of the individual, increased class stratification of society, the impoverishment of a significant part (up to 30% and above) of the population, and an increase in lumpenization. Such processes increasingly complicate the possibility of a peaceful change of power.
• In a situation of superiority of such a colonialist policy and ideology of power over other possible principles of management, the state itself destroys all factors and opportunities for its harmonious development and turns into a dangerous outcast, both for other countries and for its own citizens.
• The particular sophistication of the deceit of such regimes may lie in the fact that, while continuing to declare their commitment to all the principles of democracy, while maintaining a completely democratically acceptable constitution, the authorities are increasingly brazenly and openly violating them.
• The most educated part of the population, including the most promising in the creation and development of new technologies, is the fastest to realize the destructive consequences of the anti-people actions of the authorities. As a result, it is this contingent, above all others, that leaves the country and easily finds demand for its activities and its corresponding reward.
• Programs of paramount social significance are also deteriorating, such as: guaranteed decent pension provision, availability of modern healthcare, availability of modern and effective education, creation of a beneficial environment that ensures the formation of an individual endowed with socially useful morals and life principles. Such power not only destroys the state today, it also destroys the prerequisites for correcting the situation in the future.

The set and intensity of manifestation of the listed signs, of course, vary in each specific country. Obviously, the fewer signs and the lower the level of their intensity, the easier and softer it is possible to adjust public policy. Accordingly, the more signs and the higher the level of their intensity, the more catastrophic the situation and the more difficult it is to carry out the necessary changes peacefully. In this case, it will be naive to assume the possibility of implementing the necessary changes without completely replacing the composition of the highest bodies of management and power and without a thorough purge of the composition of all their lower bodies.

In fairness, it should be noted that even countries that are considered to have the most advanced systems of democracy (the USA, the European Union, etc.) are beginning to increasingly demonstrate the presence in their policies of the same signs of colonization, both internal and external.

All this taken together clearly indicates global crisis of systems and instruments of democracy. It is becoming increasingly obvious that none of the existing systems of democracy have effective tools for control and operational influence on power structures and government systems. Such systems, which continue to claim leadership in observing all the principles of democracy, in fact violate them more and more often. Moreover, of the entire world community, it is the largest countries, including Russia, the United States, and the European Union, that are most susceptible to such degradation. For obvious reasons, due to the presence of significant and numerous differences in many countries with Europeans and all Americans, both in culture and in religion and the level of its impact on society, in customs, in the ways of development of statehood and civil society, one should not look for a universal recipe for everyone at once. Most countries whose society is much more influenced by religion, while democratic values ​​and principles turn out to be of little significance for them, it is obvious that such countries are, at best, only ready for the gradual introduction of such elements of democracy that do not contradict their religion. It is clear that we are talking about countries with an excessive, in comparison with Europeans, etc., level of influence of Islam specifically on society and the state.

Touching upon this most important problem of religious incompatibility, it is impossible not to refer to the numerous excesses and problems in the countries of the European Union, which were caused by the excessively indiscriminate policy of the government of the European Union, which allowed such a sharp and large-scale introduction into its harmonious, centuries-old society, of a huge number of refugees, just mainly from the countries mentioned above with the dominant role and importance of Islam. Even the minimum possible was not done, for example, signing by each refugee a list of obligations facilitating and regulating his integration into society, including agreement that he must adapt to European society, etc. the absence of any rules of conduct in a democratic society, numerous hordes of refugees who in their countries meekly obeyed under the harsh oppression of their regimes. And then suddenly we found ourselves in a country where there has long been no coercion, no rigidity, everything is regulated by democratic instruments and the consciousness of citizens.

Even with the application of such minimal measures, the basic framework for the behavior of emigrants has already been clearly established. This alone would undoubtedly have prevented most of the incidents that have occurred.

The larger the state, the fewer opportunities and the lower the effectiveness of a citizen’s influence on it. In such a situation, the temptation for the authorities to simplify management is too great, minimizing control and the possibility of a citizen’s influence on the authorities, which, to a greater or lesser extent, is what any government of a large state does. And this despite the fact that it is the citizen who is the main subject of control and influence in relation to all other institutions of democracy. The real interests of the citizen and society, which, if we follow the principles of real democracy, should come first, the authorities arbitrarily and with impunity insert before them an ever-growing list of their own priorities, such as:

• geopolitical interests of the state;

• development of a system of ramified structures, as closed to society as possible, aimed at ensuring state security, including intelligence, counterintelligence, etc.;
• fulfilling its many obligations to those who financed and otherwise contributed to the success of the election campaign;
• adaptation of the legislative framework regulating the activities of government and management bodies in the interests of one’s own convenience and comfort;
• and so on.

The absurdity of such a system is obvious. From the point of view of management science, the highest institutions of government and society cannot create regulations for their activities for themselves, control themselves and evaluate their activities themselves. This order is inherently flawed. All this should be done by a hierarchically superior subject of governance, which is the community of citizens. From the point of view of observing the principles of democracy, similarly, a system of tools must be created that allows citizens to effectively form the highest institutions of power and government, allowing citizens to control their activities, quickly evaluate them, and allowing them to quickly adjust the composition and regulations of the activities of such structures.

The last paragraph, however, smoothly moves away from the initially given topic, moving into another, quite voluminous and having independent significance. It would be more logical to consider it on a separate page, called, for example, “Degradation of Democracy,” or to add this information as a subsection to the already existing “Democracy” page.

• 1 Sources
• 2 Medieval Europe
• 3 stories of Russia
• 4 Literature
• 5 Notes
• 6 Links

In Western Europe of the 11th-13th centuries, massive internal colonization was a consequence of population growth and manifested itself as the agricultural development of fallow lands, forests and swamps. Its success was evidence of the general growth of productive forces.

In the history of Russia

The prominent Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky considered the internal colonization of Russia to be a key factor in the history of the country: “the history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized.”

A number of modern researchers (A. Etkind, D. Uffelman, etc.) consider not the economic, but the ideological and mental side of internal colonization in Russia. Questions are raised about the antagonistic relations between the imperial center and the periphery, about the mutual perceptions of each other between the authorities and the people. The center, in the conditions of imperial internal colonization, views the periphery as “natural” and wild, in need of cultivation and civilizing transformation. The revolution in this vein is seen as an attempt to overcome the contradictions of internal colonization, but soon its new stage begins - the Soviet one.

A. Etkind writes:

Colonization always has two sides: active and passive; the side that conquers, exploits and benefits, and the side that suffers, suffers and rebels. But the cultural distance between the metropolis and the colony does not always coincide with the ethnic distance between them.
The situation we are interested in is located precisely at the point of transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one. For agrarian societies, as Russia was before Peter and to a great extent remained after him, the main differences are built between the cultures of the rulers and the people - linguistic, ethnic, religious, even sexual. Industrialization gives birth to nationalism as a “marriage between state and culture,” the result of their mutual attraction and harmonization. The nationalization of agrarian culture, repeatedly divided into classes, provinces, communities, dialects, estates, sects, is always self-colonization: the people turn into a nation, the peasants into the French. The process moves from the capitals to the borders, stopping only where it encounters a counter process of equal strength. The only peculiarity of Russia was its geographical extent and underpopulation, which made it difficult for the movement of people and symbols, as well as the special configuration of cultural characteristics that were subject to mixing. The overriding factor remained the cultural distance between the upper and lower classes, inherited from an agrarian society. The two worlds (the state and the rural community) were separated by an abyss, but all the resources of the state, financial and human, came from the communities. Communication between them, if possible, turned out to be distorted, risky and limited.

Literature

• Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011. 282 p.
  • Etkind A. Internal colonization. Imperial experience of Russia / Author. lane from English V. Makarova. M.: New Literary Review, 2013. 448 p.
• There, inside: practices of internal colonization in the cultural history of Russia. M.: New Literary Review, 2012.

Notes

1. Development of agriculture in the early and developed Middle Ages. Internal colonization // Samarkin V.V. Historical geography of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. M.: Higher School, 1976.
2. Klyuchevsky V. O. Course of Russian history. Lecture II.
3. Alexander Etkind. Foucault and the Internal Colonization Thesis: A Postcolonial View of the Soviet Past
4. Russia as a colony (book discussion) // Polit.ru

Links

• Internal colonization of Russia
• Internal colonization: a model for development (conversation with A. Etkind)
• Heinrich Kirschbaum. Conference “Internal Colonization of Russia” (Passau, Germany, March 23-25, 2010)
• Kevin Platt. Internal colonization: borders of empires / borders of theories (about the book by A. Etkind)

internal colonization of America, internal colonization of India, internal colonization of Mars, internal colonization is

Internal Colonization Information About

Clothing and jewelry

The climatic conditions of most European countries required dressing warmer than the Romans did. In contrast to the ancient glorification of the beauty of the human body, the church considered the body sinful and insisted that it must be covered with clothing.

For a long time, women's and men's clothing were similar: a long, knee-length shirt, short pants, an overshirt, a raincoat. In the 12th century. it began to differ more and more, the first signs of fashion appeared. Changes in clothing styles reflected the public preferences of the time. Men began wearing thick stockings in the 14th century. turned into pants, women wore skirts exclusively. However, it was mainly representatives of the wealthy strata who had the opportunity to follow fashion. The Church did not approve of the nobility's passion for fashion.

As for clothing, the peasant usually wore a linen shirt - a kameez and trousers that reached his knees or even his ankles. On top of the kameez they wore another long shirt with wide and long sleeves (blouse). The outer garment was a cloak, fastened at the shoulders with a clasp (fibula). In winter, they wore either a roughly combed sheepskin coat or a warm cape made of thick fabric or fur.

Clothing reflected a person's place in society. The attire of the wealthy was dominated by bright colors, cotton and silk fabrics. The poor were content with dark clothing made of coarse homespun linen. Shoes for men and women were leather pointed shoes without hard soles. Most poor people walked along rural roads or muddy city streets in wooden shoes or barefoot. Headdresses originated in the 13th century. and have changed continuously since then. Familiar gloves acquired important importance during the Middle Ages. Shaking hands in them was considered an insult, and throwing a glove to someone was a sign of contempt and a challenge to a duel.

The nobility loved to add various decorations to their clothes. Men and women wore rings, bracelets, belts, and chains. Very often these things were unique jewelry. For the poor, all this was unattainable. And not only because of the cost, but also because it was prohibited by law. Wealthy women spent significant amounts of money on cosmetics and perfumes, brought by merchants from eastern countries. They were envied by representatives of the fair half of humanity, who could not afford such luxury, but tried to keep up with fashionistas.

At the end of the 11th century. The population of medieval Europe for the first time began to feel that they were cramped on their continent. Knights wandered along the paths, wondering where to find their possessions, which war to take part in and conquer lands. The peasants also began to lack enough land to feed themselves and pay tribute to their feudal lord. All this forced the Europeans to start colonization- Development of new lands. The period of active European colonization was the entire period of the 11th - 13th centuries.

In the Middle Ages they distinguished military (external) and internal colonization. Military colonization was aimed at capturing new lands by force of arms beyond the spread of Western Christian civilization. The military colonization of Europeans was aimed at the Iberian Peninsula, where the fight against the Arabs was carried out, and was called reconquista(conquest), to Palestine, where the Crusades under the pretext of the transfer of the Holy Sepulcher to the Baltic States, where, under the banner of the fight against pagans, the local population was actually destroyed, etc.

Internal colonization- this is the development by peasants of an array of free lands in Europe. By that time there were enough free territories in Europe. It was only necessary to put in a lot of work so that they would produce crops and feed people. Peasants developed new lands with great difficulty, but the threat of crop failure and famine pushed them to do so. They cut down forests, drained swamps and turned them into fertile fields. That process was very difficult, grueling and long. Only within a few generations could a peasant family change an area unsuitable for agriculture into a fertile field. As a rule, the developed lands were a continuation of already existing fields.

The lords supported the efforts of the peasants; they understood: the development of new lands would lead to population growth, because then more people would be able to feed themselves; perhaps even new villages will arise whose residents will pay taxes to them, and they will become even richer. Therefore, the feudal lords encouraged peasants to cultivate virgin lands, exempting them from paying taxes for a certain period of time.

The need for land even pushed the peasants to attack the sea. Thus, the inhabitants of the Netherlands built dams and gradually conquered pieces of land from the sea, turning them into pastures. The competition between man and the water element has continued for centuries. Sometimes during storms the sea flooded the drained lands, but people restored the dams, and again, instead of sea waves, green hay appeared.

To carry out such a grandiose attack on nature, new tools and all kinds of technical inventions were required. Most of the new tools or farming methods were invented not at the time when Europeans expanded their living space (XI-XIII centuries), but much earlier. However, it was at this time that they began to be used en masse and played a decisive role. Heavy axes began to be used to cut down forests near the cleavers. To plow new lands, a heavy wheeled plow began to be used, into which, thanks to clamps and harnesses, a horse began to be harnessed. The collar transferred the burden of work for the horse from the neck to the chest, which did not contribute to rapid fatigue. And iron horseshoes for horses began to protect against injury. Heavy iron harrows began to be used to loosen the soil. Thanks to plows and harrows, it was possible to develop heavier but fertile soils. Windmills, borrowed from the East, became an important element of the rural landscape.

Along with technical innovations, new land cultivation technologies have also become established. In most parts of Europe, a three-field system has been established. The land that the peasant had at his disposal was divided into three parts. The first part of the fall was sown with winter crops. The second is spring. The third one was resting, i.e. was fallow. The following year, the first field was left fallow, the second was sown with winter crops, and the third with spring crops. In addition, crop rotation was carried out. The same crop was not sown in the same field for several years in a row. They began to use organic fertilizers. These changes in technology and technology have made it possible to slightly increase yields.

Country that is being colonized

Russian romantics and then Soviet poets sang the warmth and beauty of Russia. Historians, on the contrary, have been prone to worry about the Russian climate, natural and social. “In families we have the appearance of strangers; in the cities we look like nomads... We are, as it were, strangers to ourselves,” wrote Chaadaev, opening Russian intellectual history (see Chapter 3). For Russians, nature was not a mother, but a stepmother, wrote Sergei Solovyov (1988:7/8–9). During the turmoil of the 17th century, according to Vasily Klyuchevsky, “Moscow people seemed to feel like strangers in their own state, random, temporary inhabitants in someone else’s house” (1956: 3/52). Surprisingly, Klyuchevsky applies the same oxymoron to Peter I, a man of the 18th century: “Peter was a guest at home” (1956: 4/31). It is even more interesting that this trope emerges again when Klyuchevsky describes a typical nobleman of the early 19th century: “...with Voltaire’s book in his hands somewhere... in a Tula village,” this nobleman was “a stranger among his own” (1956: 5/183). Finally, in an essay about Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” Klyuchevsky speaks in the same words about the literary character: “He was a stranger to the society in which he had to move” (1990: 9/87). Colonization always involves an attempt master someone else's, and its failures and breakdowns led to the proliferation of objectifying discourses about his. If the feeling of being unable to become friends among strangers often accompanied the failures of external colonization, the feeling of strangers among their own turned out to be a constant form of discontent and protest associated with the situation of internal colonization. This trope is to be a stranger among your own; homesickness while staying at home is popular both among figures of the African-American movement and among postcolonial authors. “Why has God made me a stranger and an outcast in my own home?” asked African-American intellectual W.E.B. in 1903. Duboys. “Alienation from home is a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition,” argues Homi Baba; for him, the main problematic of colonial consciousness is not in the relationship of Self and Other, but in the Strangeness of Self, Otherness of the Self (Bhabha 1994: 13, 62; see also: Kristeva 1991). In this chapter we will see how, in the 19th century, the pioneers of Russian historiography searched for and found similar terms to talk about Russia's imperial experience.

Soloviev and the frontier

Having visited Russia in 1843, August von Haxthausen wrote that what was happening in Russia was not colonial expansion, but rather “internal colonization,” which had become “the most important subject of the entire internal politics and economy of this empire” (Maxthausenl856:2/76). Unlike other discoveries made by Prussian officials in Russia (see Chapters 7 and 10), this one went largely unnoticed. However, Haxthausen probably based his judgments on discussions with Russian colleagues, who willingly used the idea of ​​colonization in the hope of regulating the migration of Russian peasants to the periphery of the empire, primarily to the south of Russia and Siberia, and subsequently to Central Asia. In 1861, one of these debates about colonization, understood as the organized resettlement of human masses, took place in the Russian Geographical Society. Journalist and writer Nikolai Leskov, who himself managed internal migrations in his youth (see Chapter 11), was responding to a speech by geographer Mikhail Venyukov, who crossed Asia many times in his expeditions and later led agrarian reform in Russian Poland. Leskov argued that in fact many of the migrations were directed not to the distant possessions of the empire, but to its “middle places,” and this, Leskov said, was the main difference between the British and Russian methods of colonization (1988:60).

The mid- to late-19th century was a period of massive expansion for European empires (Arendt 1970). The Russian Empire, which participated in both the division of America and the Great Game in Asia, had to learn to talk about what was happening in its vast internal spaces. Historians who had mastered the language of world empires needed to adapt the foreign idea of ​​colonization to the vastness of provincial Russia. A conceptual breakthrough in this matter was made by the Moscow historian Sergei Solovyov. Tracing his genealogy as a historian directly from Schlözer and coordinating his actions with the Minister of Education Uvarov, he entered into a furious polemic with Khomyakov and the Slavophiles, whom he called an “anti-historical trend.” Applying the discourse of colonization to pre-Petrine Russia, Solovyov denied the very difference between the colonizers and the colonized: “It was a vast, virgin country, awaiting population, awaiting history: hence ancient Russian history is the history of a country that is being colonized” (1988: 2/631).

Soloviev formulated this striking phrase in his review of ancient Russian history. If there is no point in distinguishing between the subject and the object of Russian colonization, why do it? Soloviev vividly described the concerns of a country that is being colonized:

Populate as quickly as possible, call people from everywhere to empty places, lure with all kinds of benefits; go to new, better places, to the most favorable conditions, to a more peaceful, calm region; on the other hand, to retain the population, to return it, to force others not to accept it - these are the important issues of the colonizing country (1988: 2/631).

For the colonial consciousness there is no greater distance than between the colony and the metropolis. How can a country colonize itself? Soloviev understood this problem and specifically emphasized it:

But the country we are considering was not a colony, distant by oceans from the metropolis: it itself was the center of state life; state needs increased, state functions became more and more complicated, and yet the country did not lose the character of a colonizing country (1988: 2/631).

For the Russian language, this reflexive form of the verb, “to colonize,” is unusual, as for other European languages. In Russian it sounds impersonal, but strong and paradoxical. Despite this linguistic fact or thanks to it, Soloviev and his students constantly used precisely this formula, “colonized.” In his multi-volume history, Solovyov explained that the colonization of Russia successively proceeded from the southwest to the northeast, from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Dnieper and beyond. In the north, ancient Russian tribes advanced to Novgorod and the White Sea, in the east they captured the Upper Volga and lands around Moscow. There they founded the Russian state, but colonization continued further east and further into Siberia. It is important that Solovyov did not apply the idea of ​​a “country that is being colonized” to the new history of Russia. In the last volumes of his History, devoted to “new” rather than “ancient” Russian history, the term “colonization” does not appear.

Mark Bassin (1993) compared Solovyov's idea of ​​a "colonizing country" with Frederick J. Turner's concept of the American frontier. The similarities and differences of these ideas are significant for Russian and American historiography. Like the American frontier, the outer limit of Russian colonization was unclear, vague, and constantly shifting. As in America, this frontier was key to imperial culture. On both frontiers, persecuted religious minorities played a special role (Turner 1920; Etkind 1998; Breyfogle 2005). But there are significant differences between the concepts of Turner and Solovyov.

Turner examined contemporary events in the frontier region, while Soloviev limited the self-colonization of Russia to the most ancient period of its history, the Middle Ages. This is not as serious a difference as it might seem: there is nothing in this concept of colonization that prevents it from being applied to the modern history of Russia. As we will soon see, if Soloviev did not dare to take such a step, then Klyuchevsky did. Turner's attention, however, was focused on his own culture of the western frontier, and he examined in detail the mechanisms of its influence on the culture of the eastern states. Soloviev did not leave such a description of the external, moving border of Russian colonization, but other historians have studied in detail its individual parts. The pioneers of the border lands - hunter, trader and sectarian - were about the same, although in Russia you need to add the Cossack here; but the second and third lines of colonization are very different. In America, according to Turner, the lands adjacent to the frontier were successively managed, according to the “four stages” principle, by hunters, cattle breeders, farmers and industrialists. Then the frontier moved further to the west, and the line of these four stages was transferred there too. In Russia it was different. Over the centuries, the frontier of colonization continued to move eastward, leaving behind vast areas as virgin as ever. Subsequently, these spaces had to be colonized again and again. The American frontier and Russian colonization have different topologies: the first is continuous, like the front lines and trenches of Turner’s contemporary wars; the second left tears, pockets and folds. Perhaps the Russian experience is closer to another thesis about American expansion - Walter Webb's idea of ​​a "Great American Desert" between the east and west coasts of North America, which remained undeveloped long after the frontier line crossed it all. As Webb showed, the cultivation of the prairies required different skills and tools than the settlement of forests, which were more familiar to Europeans. Therefore, the colonization of America did not resemble a smooth movement of a line from east to west, but jumps, returns, violent movements at the edges and long pauses in the middle (Webb 1931).

From Finland to Manchuria, the lands of Northern Eurasia, conquered by the Russian sovereign, were difficult to map; it was even more difficult to study the peoples who inhabited them (Widdis 2004, Tolz 2005). For military and trade reasons, the lands and peoples on the borders where expansion was stopped by an equal enemy always turned out to be more famous than the lands inside the country. Although many zones arose along different parts of Russia's vast external colonization frontier where colonizers collaborated, competed, and hybridized with the colonized, these mixed cultures were local, highly diverse, and widely separated in time and space. To create a unified ethnosociological description of all these cultures within the framework of one work, as Turner did with the American frontier, seems impossible; no one set themselves such a task. With the help of gunpowder, alcohol and bacteria, the Russians destroyed, displaced or assimilated many peoples - neighbors, competitors, allies, enemies. But this process lasted for centuries. Waves of adventure and violence, toil and mass interbreeding rolled from the center of Russia to the moving frontiers of colonization; Colonial goods and knowledge were returned from there. Culturally, the Russian frontier was rather scarce, but geographically it was very extensive. No matter how time changed it, it always stretched over vast spaces. Within its borders, regular transitions from hunting to pastoralism and from agriculture to industrial development were the exception rather than the rule. Often the only profitable business for many centuries was hunting; sometimes cities immediately grew on land that had not seen a plow.

Developing centrifugally, the turbulent life on the moving frontiers of colonization contributed to the development of the economic centers of Russia, from Novgorod to Moscow and St. Petersburg. But even Russian capitals were founded on territories foreign to their founders. Novgorod and Kyiv were as foreign to the Varangians who ruled there as St. Petersburg was to the Muscovites who founded it. From the borders to the capitals, the space of internal colonization extended throughout Russia.

Shchapov and “zoological economy”

A significant influence on the idea of ​​Russian colonization was exerted by the historian Afanasy Shchapov, whose main works were written not while he was a university professor, but while he was a government official and political exile. He was the first to present colonization not as a stormy and victorious adventure, but as a bloody, truly political process. There were victims and victors, and the task of the historian was to discern both. Being a professor of history at the Imperial Kazan University in the late 1850s, Shchapov sorted through the archives of the Solovetsky Monastery, transported to Kazan during the preparation for the Crimean War. In the same northern archive, which survived in Kazan, the leading historian of the next generation, Vasily Klyuchevsky, collected material for his first monograph on the “monastic colonization” of the Russian North. The first review he wrote was on the work of Shchapov, of whom Klyuchevsky had “the highest opinion” (Nechkina 1974: 434).

By that time, Shchapov was no longer in Kazan. In 1861, he was arrested for inciting a riot, but then pardoned by the tsar and, moreover, appointed to an official position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Shchapov was later exiled to Siberia, where he continued to write revisionist articles, publishing them in metropolitan magazines. Agreeing with Solovyov that Russian history was a history of colonization, Shchapov described this process as “the centuries-old tension of the physical forces of the people... in the thousand-year spread of colonization and agriculture among forests and swamps, in the fight against Finnish and Turko-Mongol tribes...” (1906: 2/182) . Born near Irkutsk, the son of a Russian deacon and a Buryat woman (in Siberia such people were called “creoles”), Shchapov emphasized the role of race mixing more than other Russian historians. He was helped by the general fascination with colonial ethnography in the mid-19th century, which Shchapov adopted, in a characteristically speculative manner, from French authors. But Shchapov is quite original as a pioneer of environmental history. He described in detail two directions of Russian colonization: the fur colonization, during which hunters gradually depleted the populations of fur-bearing animals, moving further into the depths of Siberia and Alaska, and the fish colonization, which supplied Central Russia with freshwater and sea fish and caviar.

Creating his concept of “zoological economy,” Shchapov considered furs to be the key to Russian colonization (1906: 2/280–293, 309–337). From Rurik to Ivan the Terrible, the wealth of Russia was measured in furs. Beavers lured the Slavs up the Finnish rivers, the gray squirrel provided the wealth of Novgorod, the sable called the Muscovites to endless Siberia, the sea otter brought them to Alaska and California (see Chapter 5). Colonization for Shchapov did not carry a negative meaning; this beloved term appears on almost every page of his verbose and passionate texts. The industrialists were followed, often against their will, by exiles, Cossacks, and peasants. “Agricultural colonization,” wrote Shchapov, followed the “fur trade” and gradually replaced it. Ecologically, colonization meant deforestation. By cutting down forests for their subsidiary plots, industrialists did not know that they were destroying exactly what interested them in distant and cold lands - fur-bearing animals. The driving force of Russian colonization, according to Shchapov, was not the sword and gun, but the ax and the plow that followed it. But they were all preceded by a bow and a trap. Shchapov understood Russian colonization as a series of parallel histories - the migration of people, the destruction of animals, the cultivation of plants and the multifaceted process of discovery, settlement, cultivation and depletion of land. No one had created such a concept, multidimensional, ecological and humane, before Shchapov.

Klyuchevsky and modernity

Decades later, Vasily Klyuchevsky repeated the motto of his teacher Solovyov, revising it in one important respect: “The history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized... Sometimes falling, sometimes rising, this age-old movement continues to the present day” (1956: 1/31). If for Solovyov the colonization of Russia began in antiquity and ended in the Middle Ages, then for Klyuchevsky it continued further, capturing modernity. Reworking his work in 1907, he added a long fragment about resettlement in Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East. Using the new railways, these mass migrations were organized by the empire at the beginning of the 20th century. Klyuchevsky considered them the newest form of the same “century-old movement” of Russian colonization. Klyuchevsky did not make any other significant changes to the new edition of the Course of Russian History: resettlement turned out to be the only fact of our time worthy of mention in a history textbook. Thus, Klyuchevsky applied the idea of ​​colonization to the entire long period of Russian history, from its first steps to the beginning of the 20th century. As the most influential Russian historian, Klyuchevsky argued that “the colonization of the country was the basic fact of our history” and that the familiar periods of Russian history were in fact “the main moments of colonization” (1956: 1/31–32). Repeating and modifying Solovyov’s formula about Russia as a country “that is being colonized,” Klyuchevsky sought to expand the concept of colonization, bring it to the present day and strengthen its critical character. This was Klyuchevsky’s personal achievement, although here one can also see the influence of Shchapov or their common teacher, Eshevsky.

Speaking about the ancient Slavs, Solovyov gave a definition of national character, which was then often applied to Russians:

Such divergence, vagueness, and the habit of leaving at the first inconvenience resulted in semi-settlement, a lack of attachment to one place, which weakened moral concentration, taught one to seek easy work, to be reckless, to live a kind of intermittent life, to live day after day (1988: 2/ 631; see also: Bassin 1993: 500; Sunderland 2004: 171).

Referring to this portrait, Klyuchevsky argued that these unflattering characteristics of the “Russian character” arose precisely as a consequence of colonization - the situation of “a guest in one’s own country,” and often an unwanted guest. This shows the critical potential of the idea of ​​Russian colonization, which its founding fathers recognized, although not fully developed. It is precisely as a “peculiar attitude of the population towards the country,” Klyuchevsky argued, that colonization acted “in our history for centuries” and operates “to this day.” In colonization, Klyuchevsky saw “the main condition” that caused “by its change... a change in the forms of community life” in Russian history.

Self-applicable judgments have a special logic. If X does Y to Z, as in the statement “Britain colonized India,” this implies that X and Z already existed before Y occurred. But such straightforward logic does not work in the case of Russian colonization because, as Soloviev and Klyuchevsky argued, during colonization Russia created itself. In their formula “Russia colonized itself,” X made Y with X. Before Y there was no X, and there is no Z that was originally different from X. They all arose simultaneously. As Klyuchevsky wrote, the “area of ​​colonization” in Russia “expanded along with its state territory.” Since the colonized areas did not retain a special status, but were absorbed by the state, in Russia there is no reason to distinguish between the colonies and the metropolis. As the state expanded, Russia colonized not only the newly developed territories, but also itself. Moreover, the central territories were repeatedly subjected to the process of colonization.

The history of Russia is not the history of a country that colonizes, and it is not the history of a country that is colonized. “The history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized.” The calm, academic repetition at the beginning of this formula in no way prepares for its paradoxical, deconstructive ending.

However, the formula remained stable and, moreover, became canon. In fact, the repetition at the beginning of the formula (“The history of Russia is the history of the country”) is not a tautology. Soloviev and Klyuchevsky warn the reader that in this case they are talking about Russia as a country, and not as a people, state or empire. In Russian, as in many other languages, the word “country” stands between the geographical “land” and the political “nation”. This is exactly the word that historians needed. They could not convey their point without rhetorical repetition, because an alternative definition (for example, “The history of Russia consisted of colonizing itself”) would suggest that Russia existed before this self-colonization. But their idea was to describe the cyclical, reflexive or recurrent process that created and continues to create Russia, which is carrying out this very process. Polished by repeated use, this formula couldn't look any different. That's why they repeated it like a meme.

School of Colonization

Klyuchevsky's followers distinguished between different methods of colonizing Russia: “free colonization”, which was carried out by private people - runaway serfs, deserter soldiers, persecuted sectarians; “military colonization”, which was the result of military campaigns, from the capture of Novgorod and Kazan to operations in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Amur; “monastic colonization,” centered around large Orthodox monasteries, which owned thousands of serfs, conducted trade and created trading posts; and “Cossack colonization,” which was carried out by a class created by the empire specifically for the tasks of external colonization and border service (but as the borders moved east, it turned into a caste incapable of internal colonization). Historians have told how Russia's routes to the east were paved by industrialists, blessed by monks, fortified by Cossacks, and cultivated by settlers. The goal of Klyuchevsky’s school was to create a systematic and balanced overview of these events, revealing Russia’s civilizational mission in the vastness of Eurasia. True to the cause of Russian nationalism, Klyuchevsky's disciples tended to underestimate the mass violence that such forms of colonization brought with them. Although it was local resistance and colonial violence that made necessary all those stockades, walls and towers of forts, kremlins and monasteries, the development of which was described in detail by Klyuchevsky's school, sensitivity to such violence and compassion for its victims came with a new generation of historians who lived through the Russian Revolution. Having become its participants, many of them were arrested or emigrated, but the most successful ones continued to write.

Klyuchevsky’s student, Pavel Milyukov, combined history and politics for decades. In his youth, he managed to take part in military operations in the Caucasus (1877), and after becoming a teacher at Moscow University, he was fired and convicted of political activities in the capital (1895). With the victory of the revolution in February 1917, he became the minister of the revolutionary government, and after the Bolshevik coup he took part in the Civil War. Then for many years he played the role of the political leader of the anti-Soviet emigration. In his multi-volume course on Russian history, Miliukov showed better than his predecessors the scale of violence that the process of colonization required. Combining the historical tradition he received from his predecessors, from Schlözer to Klyuchevsky, with the equally strong ethnographic tradition developed from Herder to Shchapov, Milyukov presented a detailed study of the peoples who were assimilated or destroyed by the Russians in the process of their colonization. Combining sources from state archives with notes from travelers and soldiers, as well as local legends, folklore, names of rivers and villages, he restored the names of disappeared peoples, put them on a geographical map and tried to return them to history. For Miliukov, this was both a duty to historical memory and a form of resistance to a regime that was creating new violence in Russia. The concept of colonization played a central role in Miliukov's work. An article he wrote for the Russian Encyclopedia just in the year of his arrest states: “The colonization of Russia by the Russian tribe was carried out throughout Russian history and constitutes one of its most characteristic features” (1895: 740).

Klyuchevsky’s student was also Mikhail Pokrovsky, who took on the difficult task of revising the legacy of imperial historiography, adapting it to the new conditions created by the Bolsheviks, to which he himself belonged. Among his other ideas, he valued the “heresy” that likened the development of Russian political economy to the “colonial system”, as Marx depicted it in the first volume of Capital. More of a critic and polemicist than a theorist or archival historian, Pokrovsky saw in any historical work a distorting mirror of ideology, subject to interpretation from a Marxist position. Having devoted many caustic pages to criticism of Russian liberal historians, Pokrovsky emphasized the influence of the persecuted Shchapov on them, considering Klyuchevsky himself a student of this “materialist”. The Romanov Empire, Pokrovsky wrote, always remained “a colonial power of the most primitive type,” and therefore required extensive development to the east; This is how he explained the wars on the eastern borders of the empire. Siberia, the Caucasus, Central Asia - “a huge eastern bubble that hung heavily on the Russian national economy” (a recent book about Siberia literally repeats this image). As long as the empire had the opportunity for extensive development, it could avoid social reforms and technical progress, therefore, it is “the colonialist activities of the Romanovs” that is the reason for Russian backwardness (Pokrovsky 1933: 248). Pokrovsky's ideas about the essential difference between the two types of capital, commercial and industrial, are long outdated, but many postcolonial historians born a century later would recognize their ideas in his denunciations of Russian colonization. More interested in the history of international relations than in social changes in Russia, Pokrovsky also wrote about the attempts of Western powers to colonize Russia through a system of bank credit. While dealing with processes of external colonization, he did not take advantage of the opportunities that a Marxist analysis of the internal colonization of imperial spaces could have given him; but Lenin directly pointed out these possibilities (see Chapter 1). Having entered into a passionate polemic with Trotsky and, it seems, winning the sympathy of young communist historians (see Chapter 4), Pokrovsky did not know that after his death he would be subjected to absurd but destructive criticism from Stalin. I have no doubt that the basis for the 1938 campaign in which the Pokrovsky school was declared to be a “base of spies, saboteurs and terrorists” was the very real differences between aggressive Stalinist imperialism and the liberating, decolonizing ideals of the early years of the revolution. Not a trace should have remained of them, precisely as ideals.

Having lived to see the beginning of decolonization and experienced the tragic experience of revolution, collectivization and terror, Klyuchevsky’s students understood the political meaning of their work in a new way. The most prominent of them, Matvey Lyubavsky, was the rector of the Imperial Moscow University until 1917. He remained in Russia and was arrested in 1930 in the so-called “case of historians,” so Lyubavsky wrote his last book, “Review of the History of Russian Colonization,” in political exile in Bashkiria. In it, he once again repeated the idea that “Russian history is essentially the history of a continuously colonizing country.” Instead of the reflexive form used by his predecessors, he used a simpler construction: “continuously colonizing” instead of “colonizing itself.” The change is small, but significant: it is fully consistent with Lyubavsky’s concept, which revealed the importance of external colonization in the formation of the Russian state (Lyubavsky 1986). Having brought his research to the end of the 19th century, Lyubavsky included in it a chapter on the colonization of the Baltic lands. He probably saw the irony of history in the fact that a book about colonization ended with a chapter about the territory on which the capital of the empire was built. There was also a sad irony in the fact that the leading Moscow historian created his main book in Bashkiria - one of those colonized regions about which he wrote. The book remained in manuscript, but survived and was published half a century later.

A younger scientist, Yevgeny Tarle, also arrested in the “historians’ case,” was soon released and became a major Soviet historian. He wrote his main work (Tarle 1965) on European colonialism, the highest manifestation of imperialism, which was inconsistently opposed by the Russian Empire and consistently by the Soviet Union. Sympathetic to the Third World of former colonies and critical of the First World of imperialism, this book by the Soviet historian left unfilled the same gigantic lacuna that Said's books, and then postcolonial studies, left unfilled - the Second World. The oceanic difference between Pokrovsky, Lyubavsky and Tarle - their works as much as their destinies - illustrates the range of interpretations of the central concept for them, colonization, and the common heritage of the Klyuchevsky school (Etkind 2002).

During the late imperial period, the school of colonization dominated Russian historiography. From lectures, her ideas and concepts moved into textbooks, and from there into encyclopedias. Russian historians have written detailed works about how Russia conquered Siberia, Crimea, Finland, Poland or Ukraine. However, they rarely called these territories Russian colonies, preferring to generally speak of Russia as “a country that is being colonized.” A notable exception in this regard is another political exile, Nikolai Yadrintsev, whose book Siberia as a Colony (2003, first published 1882) became a remarkable example of critical, anti-imperial history. The first mention in Ukrainian literature that Ukraine was a Russian colony dates back to 1911 (Velychenko 2012). But the works of Shchapov and Yadrintsev did not enter the mainstream of Russian historiography. Saying that Russia colonized itself, Soloviev and Klyuchevsky did not deny the conquest of Siberia, the Caucasus or Poland, but they did not protest against them either. In academic language, however, their formulas criticized the specific character of the Russian Empire: “As the territory expanded, along with the growth of the external power of the people, its internal freedom was increasingly constrained,” wrote Klyuchevsky (1956: 3/8). “The state was swelling, and the people were fading” (1956: 3/12), he wrote, generalizing this situation by the law of the inverse relationship between imperial space and internal freedom. All this was put into the short and repetitive formula of “a country that is being colonized.”

By connecting subject and object, the idea of ​​self-colonization gave Russian historians a complex and paradoxical, but useful language. The discourse of self-colonization constituted just one of the periods in Russian historiography, although it dominated for a long time and proved to be tenacious. Working during the era of colonial empires and dealing with a country that rivaled those empires, leading Russian historians found the language of colonization necessary and appropriate for their studies of Russia. However, they radically rethought the Western idea of ​​colonization. Firstly, the Solovyov-Klyuchevsky school understood colonization as an internal process and aimed at the subject himself, and not just as an external process aimed at a distant and alien object. Secondly, historians of this school ambivalently condemned and approved of the processes of colonization, which differs from the critical tradition of British and French historiography and especially from the ideologically driven postcolonial approach. In the 19th century, Russian historians did not necessarily attach a critical meaning to “colonial” terminology. Even the exiled Shchapov admired the heroism of those who colonized the vast country, but condemned the massacres they themselves carried out. When Miliukov, the boldest critic of Russian colonization, became foreign minister, he became a hawk for whom the goal of the First World War was to conquer Constantinople for Russia. And yet, in the century-long space of Russian historiography, from Pogodin and Solovyov to Miliukov and Lyubavsky, postcolonial dynamics are noticeable: imperial self-praise of colonization processes became less and less relevant, and appeal to the memory of colonized, assimilated or destroyed peoples, on the contrary, aroused more and more interest among historians .

With the defeat of Pokrovsky, Soviet historians abandoned the idea that the discourse of colonization was applicable to Russian history: it did not correspond to the class approach and the idea of ​​a union of socialist republics. In Russia at the end of the 19th century, colonization could be considered a progressive phenomenon, but in the Soviet Union it began to be perceived as a reactionary process, which, precisely because of this, has little in common with Russian history. Klyuchevsky’s biographer considered his concept of Russian colonization one of her teacher’s weakest ideas (Nechkina 1974: 427). But the colonization paradigm continued to live in the works of the almost forgotten school of political geography, headed by Veniamin Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky (1915; Polyan 2001). Soviet exploration of the Arctic continued under the name of colonization, to which some historians of Klyuchevsky’s school had a hand (Essays 1922; Holquist 2010a). Naturally, colonial terminology completely disappeared from official discourse in the early 1930s, when the Soviet government carried out the most massive colonization of Russia using the most brutal methods in its history - collectivization and the Gulag.

Historians of the school of colonization did not specialize in criticizing Russia's imperial aspirations. Their historiographical tradition was secular, liberal and nationalist. Like the Russian monarchs, these historians participated in a global process of “knowledge exchange between empires” (Stoler 2009: 39), connecting the Russian and other empires through relations of selective and sometimes mutual imitation. The notebooks of Klyuchevsky, a recognized leader of Russian historical science, amaze the reader with political despair, which is deeper hidden in his course of lectures: “In the Europe of the Tsars, Russia could have power, even decisive; in Europe of peoples, it is a thick log washed ashore by a stream” (Klyuchevsky 2001: 406). From the mid-19th to the beginning of the 20th century, historians of three generations, whose ideas and textbooks formed the basis of Russian historiography, agreed on little among themselves. But there was one formula that they repeated one after another in agreement: “Russia is a country that is being colonized.” Isaev Alexey Valerievich

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