Russia's Own Orient

«Å skape mening i konsolideringens navn»

“…Det Kreml-sponsede erindringsprosjektet «Det historiske perspektivfondet» (Fond izutsjenija istoritsjeskoj perspektivy), som blir ledet av Natalia Narotsjnitskaja, spilte en rolle her. 20 I sin tale i Det russiske føderasjonsrådet den 27. juni 2012, gikk Putin hardt ut og erklaerte at Russlands nederlag i første verdenskrig skyldtes bolsjevikledernes forraederi: Han klandret dem for at de i mars 1918 hadde trukket Russland ut av krigen og inngått en separatfred med sentralmaktene (BrestLitovsk-traktaten), der Sovjet-Russland måtte anerkjenne Polens, Finlands, de baltiske staters og Ukrainas selvstendighet (Ukraina ble i praksis et tysk protektorat), og avstå deler av Kaukasus. Senere ville de ikke innrømme at Brest-Litovsk hadde vaert et feilgrep, hevdet Putin, og derfor fortsatte de å kalle denne krigen for «imperialistisk» og unnlot å hedre den russiske haeren og dens heroisme.…”

“…Med rehabiliteringen av begrepet «Den store krigen» og av Russlands deltakelse i den, kan man også snakke om en gryende reintegrering av Russland i det felleseuropeiske erindringsrom eller «symbolske fellesskap». 25 …”

Introduction: Edward Said, Russian Orientalism and Soviet Iranology

“…9 Secondly, and especially importantly, Said is sometimes deemed irrelevant to the Russian case because of an alleged uniqueness, or at least "distinctiveness" possessed by Russian history and geopolitics. 10 In his article on Grigor'ev, Nathaniel Knight, for example, put forward a widely held view rejecting the applicability of the Orient/Occident dichotomy to Russia, arguing instead in favor of an "awkward triptych" in which Russia was neither fully western nor eastern but was rather inserted between West and East.…”

“…Indeed, this latter sentiment took formal shape in the theory of Eurasianism, a type of pan-Eurasian nationalism in which culturally distinct peoples would be bound together under Russian leadership, a theory and political project which underwent a dramatic revival after the collapse of the Soviet order and which endures until today. 12 According to this approach, whereas for Britain and France the imperial project was located far beyond the national territory, for Russia the Orient consisted in the first instance of territories physically incorporated into the state, especially the Caucasus and Turkestan. Europeans and non-Europeans accordingly mingled more naturally and closely within the Russian than within the Anglo-French imperial spaces, and integration and assimilation might be encouraged and rewarded, any parallel to the contribution of the Russified Tartar elite to Russian culture, for example, being unthinkable in the Anglo-French experience.…”

“…Yet, as Alexander Morrison has pointed out, other empires, notably the Raj, also experienced such a "collaborative enterprise of knowledge formation," 22 with British Orientalists profoundly reliant upon their Indian interlocutors, while the nature of any "dialogue" between imperial scholar and native, in the context of profound inequalities of power, remains problematic. 23 These debates about the role played by Russian Orientalism in legitimizing tsarist imperial conquest first emerged in relation to the vast polyglot areas incorporated into the Russian empire, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Here the influence of Persian/ Iranian languages and culture was profound, and links between urban centers, Tiflis, Baku, Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and cities in Iran manifold and enduring.…”