NCeHu 31/12
How
Imperial Russia wooed
Asia
Russia's own Orient:
The politics of identity and Oriental studies in
the Imperial and early Soviet periods by
Vera Tolz
Reviewed by Dmitry
Shlapentokh
www.atimes.com
14/1/12
The West's military
predicament in Asia is worsening as United States
departs from Iraq, leaving it mostly to Iran - and
prepares to leave Afghanistan with an unstable
government in Kabul. Even in Libya, an apparent
victory could fade as the country slides into the
chaos with jihadis most likely taking advantage.
Still military defeat could pale in
comparison to the consequences of economic
decline, with even the East under threat.
American pundits such as Paul Krugman from
The New York Times say China, the economic and
increasingly political center of Asia, will soon face
instability due to global economic woes. Other
pundits assert that China is heading for a "hard
landing".
The increasing role of Asia on
the world stage leads to non-Asian countries being
increasingly seen through an Asian prism, and
Russia is no exception. Moscow continues to flirt
with Iran and China, while seeking a "Eurasian"
union.
As a result, several works on
Russians' study of Asia and perceptions of Asia
have been published. Vera Tolz's Russia's own
Orient: The politics of identity and Oriental
studies in the Imperial and early Soviet
periods, deals with the study of the Orient in
Russia in the last decade of the czarist regime,
and the impact that these studies had on early
Soviet Russia.
 The work is meticulously
researched, with a wealth of materials taken from
many different sources, Russia's archives among
them. However, the abundance of material and
details could distract the reader from the book's
main focus.
As Tolz implies, the Russian
government's desire to develop Oriental studies
was not so much pragmatic interest, ie desire to
have a qualified personnel for imperial
bureaucracy. The Russian academy often did not
help the government in this respect.The
relationship between Russian academics and the
imperial administration was rather tense, at least
in comparison with the West.
The reason
the imperial bureaucracy introduced Oriental
studies was a desire to imitate the West; Russia
should have everything that one could find in
Europe. Thus Russian "Orientalism" was a peculiar
form of Westernism. The desire to imitate the West
was followed not just by imperial bureaucracy but
also by Russian scholars.
However, there
was a substantial difference between them and
their Western colleagues in one important aspect:
they eagerly included in their ranks the
indigenous people of the empire. Asians emerge
here not just as subjects - as was often the case
in Western studies - but as colleagues accepted as
peers.
Russian scholars engaged in
academic training of quite a few minorities. The
specificity of the Russian scholars' approach was
related to the peculiar milieu of late imperial
Russia, where the intelligentsia glamorized anyone
who was seen as downtrodden.
The image of
the minorities was tightly connected here with the
image of the Russian masses. One, of course, could
find a glamorous image of the masses in the West
by the end of the nineteenth-early twentieth
century. Indeed, the glamorous vision of the
industrial proletariat constituted the very nature
of the Marxist world view.
Still, Western
thought at the time was different. For prominent
Western intellectuals as Gustave Le Bon and
Impolite Taine, the masses were hardly heroic and
benign. Taine noted in his detailed account of the
French Revolution that this group were the "last
full gorillas".
Nothing of this sort was
found in Russian Oriental studies from this era.
Indeed, even the majority of conservative
intellectuals regarded the Russian populace as
being basically benign with revolutionary
activities a result of harmful outside influence.
This was seen in the academic treatment of
minorities of the empire, with Jews among the few
exceptions. Minorities were seen as wholesome
subjects of the czar basically happy under the
wing of the Russian eagle. According to Tolz,
these benign views of the minorities by Russian
academia, who trained/incorporated quite a few in
their rank, played an extremely important role
after the Bolshevik Revolution.
She
rightfully notes the exceptionally good treatment
of minorities by the Bolshevik authorities already
in the very beginning of the regime's existence.
But, still one could question the author's notion
that this was due to the training of minorities to
become part of the scientific/bureaucratic
establishment in imperial Russia.
This
could play a role, but it had no part in
determining the regimes' policy toward minorities,
at least from the reviewer's perspective. Indeed,
the emerging Bolshevik regime was absolutely alien
from the majority of the population.
Consequently, minorities - especially
Jews, Letts and others - were one of the major
early props of the Soviet regime. Later, when the
regime's position became more stable, the
minorities' role in politics and consequently the
ideological construction of the regime started to
decline.
To sum up, one of course could
agree or disagree with this or that notion but the
book's observations are sound and based on a
wealth of new materials.
Russia's own
Orient: The politics of identity and Oriental
studies in the Imperial and early Soviet
periods by Vera Tolz. Oxford University Press,
USA (April 8, 2011). ISBN-10: 0199594449. Price
US$99, 224 pages.
Dmitry
Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of
history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Indiana University South Bend. He is author of
East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life
of Themistocles, 2005.
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