SUMMARY: Alexander Etkind approaches the first publication of the lectures on Russian intellectual history by Michael Karpovich as a long-awaited answer to the riddle of this Harvard historian who educated the whole post–World War II generation of American historians of Russia, while not publishing much research work. Etkind analyzes the image of intellectual history that formed this brilliant generation, which included Martin Malia, Marc Raeff, and other famous names in the field. He compares Karpovich's approach with that of Isaiah Berlin or Raeff, and reconstructs the ideological wars that permeate the lectures. Finally, Etkind stresses the "triple nostalgia" of Karpovich, which supplied his narrative on Russian history with a unique and personal quality.
SUMMARY: Slezkine's book is a breakthrough. Borrowing from and then rejecting Nietzsche's paradigm of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Slezkine posits the opposition between the Mercurial, meaning mobile, cosmopolitan, modern, and the Apollonian, meaning land-bound, aristocratic or peasant, and anti-modern. Jews exemplify the mercurial. Whereas Marx animates classes and ignores ethnicities, Slezkine animates ethnicities and ignores classes. Slezkine avoids dealing with the question of how to account for a classical bourgeoisie ( Tier État ) that shared the same ethnic background as their Apollonian counterparts. The compelling center of his argument, however, is the attribution of modernity to Jews and the suggestion that those who have murdered Jews, from the Russian pogroms to the Holocaust, have been struggling to stop modernity. Essentializing the mercurial and modernity, Slezkine gives them a taste and smell that can be loved or hated. Modernity can be destroyed in its personification, the Jew. In the 21 st century, modernity becomes an empire and vice versa, but was this true in the "Jewish" 20 th century? Slezkine's argues that the fact that Jews equal modernity is exemplified by their overrepresentation in the Bolshevik regime from 1917–1949. But were Bolsheviks modern? Slezkine takes the positive answer for granted. Taking into account the Soviet's actual resistance to modernity, Jewish participation in Stalinist Russia (as well as in similar affairs such as the movement of "the fellow travelers" in the U.S.) does not confirm but rather undermines Slezkine's central argument.
Slezkine redefines the history of the Jews in the 20 th century as the history of three emigrations from the Pale: to America, to Israel, and to Russia's cities. The fourth group was annihilated in the Holocaust. The concept of Russian Jews being immigrants in the same way as American or Israeli Jews transforms the conventional conception and self-conception of Russian Jews as local residents. With this new construction, Slezkine has irreversibly altered our understanding of the Diaspora.
In Slezkine's well-grounded emphasis upon the overrepresentation of Jews in the Russian revolution, he provokes the unpleasant question of historical responsibility for its terror. Jews demand an acknowledgement of German responsibility for the Holocaust; can they avoid a similar debate in respect to their role in the Revolution? Ethnic diversity makes the issue of Soviet guilt more complex than the issue of the German guilt. It does not make this issue irresolvable or undebatable. Slezkine avoids these questions. He asserts that in the absence of a divine judge, collective guilt is not subject to analysis. But in secular culture, collective guilt is embodied in the work of memory. Slezkine's work is actually written in this genre of collective (in this case, ethnic) memory. Rather than writing another book on the role of Jews in modern history, Slezkine has launched a pioneering contribution to the debate on Jewish responsibility. Such a book, for the Jew and non-Jew alike, would define the features of the post-revolutionary century. Unfortunately, Slezkine did not fully realize his own message. However, what he has done is a remarkable advance against the forces of hypocrisy and oblivion.
SUMMARY: Alexander Etkind takes as his point of departure a hypothesis according to which the phenomena of mass terror in the 20 th century generated by Soviet Communism and German National-Socialism can be compared as objects of socio-cultural investigation despite their unique features. Etkind attempts to uncover structural specifics of cultural and historical memory of the Holocaust in Germany and of the Soviet terror in contemporary Russia. The central focus of the article is thus on the production and genres of today's representation of memory of the Terror. The author distinguishes between hardware memory, understood as material expressions of memory in the form of monuments and memorials, and software memory, understood as a text and crystallized in public discourses. Interaction and mutual communicability of these two forms of memory is a condition of a normal development of the national cultural and historical memory. The emergence of hardware memory depends on the public consensus about the past, which is problematic in Russia due to the unfinished revolutionary period. In a democratic Germany these processes of the emergence of hardware memory were completed in late 1940s and by now mnemo-projects to commemorate the Holocaust are of a procedural character. Unlike in Germany, in Russian society culture is overloaded with historical memory and its varying interpretations. This exceeding historicism turns historical memory into a decentralized complex of judgments and symbols and prevents it from crystallizing in the form of monuments and memorials. Etkind turns his attention to differences between museum and memorial forms of representing the past, as well as considers the search for an adequate iconic representation of historical traumata. Those few monuments that do exist in Russia represent the result of a compromise of a desire to articulate a particular political opinion, artistic abstract expression, religious symbolism, and the dominant political demand.
SUMMARY: In his article Alexander Etkind scrutinizes the applicability of Said's theory of Orientalism to the history of Russia and, critically revising the basic premises of that theory, suggests an array of political, cultural, and intellectual phenomena in Russian history that could be placed in and interpreted within the perspective of Orientalism. Etkind starts with recapitulation of Said's theory, pointing to the well-known fact that it was based on the specifics of the colonial relationships within the French and British modern empires. He notes that historical Orientalism, alon with postcolonial discourse, tends to reify seemingly discrete entities of the colonizing West and the colonized East, thus obscuring national differences among the modern colonial and semi-colonial powers. Applied to a historical variety of colonial and post colonial situations beyond the realm of typical colonial empires, the thesis of Orientalism reveals its core, which, according to Etkind, is a complex of practices designed to create and manipulate the cultural distance, which can be formulated in geographic, racial, ethnic, religious, and class terms. Marrying Said to Gellner, Etkind states that in a traditional society and on a scarcely populated territory of the Russian empire the colonization and orientalization were directed inward rather than outward; that is, the population of the core of the empire was viewed as culturally different (in case of romanticism, as inferiority or superiority) by the westernized elite and subjected to a civilizing mission of the state. Etkind illustrates this thesis by drawing on an array of examples, including the settlement of foreign colonists, the military colonies during the reign of Alexander I, the historiography of "Russian colonization," and the relationship between external expansion and internal colonization. Tracing the intellectual origins of the thesis on internal colonization, the author turns to Chaadaev and his radical interpretation of the process of Europeanization of Russia as a colonial one. Emphasizing the centrality of intellectual and cultural production for maintaining and manipulating cultural distance, Etkind analyzes the discourse of "the people" as developed both by Russian intelligentsia of the populist creed and in Russian ethnography, suggesting that beginning with the Slavophiles and ending with the collapse of the Ancien Regime in 1917 the educated and political elite of Russia fell under the influence of a postcolonial attitude toward the colonized people, which contributed to the "internal" decolonization of Russia. In conclusion, Etkind argues that colonialism and the associated practices of cultural distancing returned in a cyclical manner during the Soviet period.
SUMMARY: This is the authorized translation of a chapter from a new book by Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization. Russia's Imperial Experience (forthcoming from Polity Press, September 2011). In this book, Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conquered foreign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, thereby colonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision of colonization as simultaneously internal and external is crucial for scholars of empire, colonialism, and globalization. Starting with the fur trade, which shaped Russia's enormous territory, and ending with the Empire's collapse in 1917, Etkind explores serfdom, the peasant commune, and other institutions of internal colonization. His account brings out the formative role of foreign colonies in Russia, the self-colonizing discourse of Russian classical historiography, and the revolutionary leaders' illusory hopes for an alliance with the exotic, pacifist sectarians. Transcending the boundaries between history and literature, Etkind examines striking writings about Russia's imperial experience, from Defoe to Tolstoy and from Gogol to Conrad. The message is historical, theoretical, and literary at once. Postcolonial theory helps us to understand Russian history; Russian literature fills gaps in postcolonial theory.
