‘With the help of the great Russian people’

Abstract

In contrast to the racist theories produced in the 'West' that explicitly addressed differences in skin colour, Russian imperial politics did not speak the language of whiteness, 1 but differentiated the population along the lines of religion ('inovertsy') and ethnicity. Indeed, many non-Slavic people, particularly those in the Eastern part of the empire, were called 'inorodtsy '. 2 This was an imperial term for people who did not belong to the Russian/ Slavic majority, and were usually assumed to be non-Christian/Orthodox Christian. The unspoken but existing connections between Slavicness, Russianness, and the Orthodox Christianity evoked by 'inorodtsy' influenced Soviet thinking about racial divisions within a future socialist society. This happened despite the fact that the word 'inorodtsy', clearly indicating 'Otherness', was taken out of the lexicon of the 'builders of socialism'.Tsarist imperial politics had assumed that the multireligious and multilingual population of the empire could be at least partly Russified by spreading the Orthodox religion and Russian language. 3 Russified representatives of colonised and minority peoples could expect to receive some privileges of (white) Russianness -for example, being able to occupy administrative, military, and educational posts. Using Homi Bhabha's discussion on colonial mimicry, it is possible to say that it was a Russian imperial version of 'appropriating' the Other and visualising power and discipline. 4 At the same time, Russian imperial managers aspired for Russia to become a modern empire. 5 The people in its Eastern provinces were expected to be civilised through modern schooling and hygienic education -practices that could be comparable to the civilising mission that white Western Europeans claimed to pioneer. This made the 'inorodtsy' of the Russian Empire comparable with the colonised people in other parts of the world: all of them had to learn a more modern way of life through communication with the (white) coloniser. 6